


Empty Houses

by PlaidAdder



Series: Wild About Harry [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angst, BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Case Fic, Complete, Dancing, F/F, First Time, Long, M/M, Mystery, Norwood Builder, Post Reichenbach, The Adventure of the Empty House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-05
Updated: 2013-03-29
Packaged: 2017-12-04 09:50:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 44,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/709395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A month after Sherlock's fall, John is coming apart at the seams. His sister Harry puts her law practice on hold and comes out to help John through the worst. When Harry reluctantly agrees to go out to Clara's house in Norwood to make out Clara's will, she becomes the prime suspect in Clara's murder. With Lestrade now his bitter enemy, John has to solve the case on his own...or does he?</p><p>****</p><p>"Empty Houses" was written during the hiatus between the end of Series 2 and the beginning of Series 3. As of "Empty Hearse," the events depicted here are no longer consistent with canon. They remain, however, consistent with your burning desire to ship John and Sherlock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. THE NINTH STEP

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place about a month after the end of "Reichenbach Fall." John and Sherlock are not literally lovers...yet. And it is now complete. Hooray!

_It happens in the dreams exactly as it did in life except for one thing. I get to the body and it looks like him at first. Scarf, coat, face, blood. But when I reach to take a pulse my hand shatters and I’m in pieces. I can see the pieces. They’re not bleeding. They look like the pieces of a stained-glass window of me, knocked out of the frame._

_I wake up and sometimes I don’t even open my eyes. It might be a long time before I get out bed. Or off the couch, or wherever I was when I lost consciousness. Falling asleep doesn’t seem to work now._

_If I open my eyes I stare at the ceiling and think about the last things he said to me. That it was all true. Meaning it was all lies. I think back on everything that happened to me, everything that happened to us. I remember my legs shaking and the weight of the bomb on my chest, watching him think, listening to him talk, hoping it will just be all right, he can solve this one like he solved all the others. I thought he had. Then he hadn’t. Then my heart started beating again. Years off my life. And it was all made up. The bomb wasn’t real. Moriarty wasn’t real. This is what he told me. Right before he died._

_I told him that no one would make me believe he told me a lie. And nobody could have. Except him. Day after day I try to make it come out right but it’s like one of those logic problems where one person always lies and one person always tells the truth. He must have told me a lie. Either that day on the roof…or every day before that._

_It’s all true. It was all lies. This is what I think, staring up at the ceiling of the wretched bedsit that I can barely pay for. Mrs. Hudson has told me she’ll take me back, reduce the rent, waive the rent. Just come back dearie, she says. I can’t. I can’t look at that place without him in it. I can’t look at that room and hear him saying It’s all true._

_It’s all true. It was all lies. I helped him tell them, on this blog. And I loved those lies. I loved it all. I don’t know how I will live without it. But I have to end the lie. So this is it. The last post. The final entry of the blog of Dr. John H. Watson._

John had no idea how long he had been looking at the screen. He’d read and reread the words until they decomposed. They were a meaningless jumble of letters and space, a code to which nobody living could find the key.

His burning eyes shifted toward the upper right hand corner of the screen, fastening onto the little oblong button that read PUBLISH.

He lost the focus. Now, next to the screen of his laptop, he could see the litter surrounding it. His eyes roamed the rubbish heaped up on the table and mechanically picked out, as they had learned to do in Afghanistan, the dangerous details, the bits and pieces from which harm might come. The bottle of Bushmills. The sleeping tablets. The gun. The button that said PUBLISH.

So many triggers. Which to press.

A buzz. The door to the street. It wouldn’t be for him.

Three buttons on that screen. Delete. Publish. Save to draft.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

Another tenant clomping down the stairs to get the door.

Door opening. Door closing. Two sets of footsteps, one stopping after the first floor, one going up to the second.

Publish and perish.

And up to the third.

John reached toward the table.

Bang.

FUCK.

“John!”

Jesus Christ. It’s Harry. Jesus. Stop shaking.

Only Harry. Not Moriarty or a Chinese assassin or a trio of heavily armed wankers from the CIA. Harry wasn’t the end of the world. Better a colossal bitch than a gigantic hound.

Bang. Bang. Bangbangbangbangbang.

“John. Open up.”

“Go away, Harry,” he shouted.

“No.”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Open the bloody door, John.”

John had noticed in the past few days that his body seemed to have become heavier. It was the same size and shape; just harder to move.

On the other side of the opened door was a woman in a charcoal-grey suit. Her dark hair—dyed, of course, she was born with a mousy color which she kept tinkering with—was a little longer than he last remembered, and, in the waviness of the top layers, slightly more feminizing. Might even be some product there. She had gone back to glasses. Trendy, oblong, dark bakelite frames. As always, the square shoulders and heavy hips gave the impression of strength, though as John knew she was not much of a wrestler, and, to her great shame and indignation, threw like a girl. She was carrying a briefcase in one hand and a great bulging string bag full of fruit and veg in the other.

“Why now?” John said.

“What?” Harry replied.

“A phone call, at the time, would have been a nice gesture. A text, even.”

“Listen,” said Harry. “When Dad left, when Mum died, when you lost…”

Harry stopped short of saying the name.

“You know this,” Harry resumed. “For a week, the world stops and everyone rallies round. Two weeks out, they’re still thinking of you, popping in with covered dishes, asking how are you, no, _how are you, really_. Three weeks and they’re all back in the real world, pausing every so often over a cappuccino to wonder how you’re getting on. It’s now week four. Everyone else is doing whatever it was they did before the world ended. Whereas for you…it’s just now finally hit.”

Harry walked through the door. John couldn’t get his arms moving fast enough to stop her. He slammed the door behind her instead.

“I saw it in the paper and I looked at my calendar and I thought, as long as I have wifi, I can be out of the office for one month maximum before the practice crashes. So I decided to wait and take the four weeks when they would do the most good. Which is, obviously, right now.”

John sank into the chair, watching Harry open the fridge and peer into it.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m good.”

“Utter crap.”

It could have been her reply; or it could have been her identification of the unrecognizable organic matter she was removing from the fridge.

“There’s no place for you to sleep.”

“I’m in a hotel.”

“What’s all that then?” he said, gesturing at the string bag.

“Food.”

“And what’s in the case?”

She hesitated. “I’ll tell you all about it once you’re sitting up and taking nourishment.”

Harry opened the cupboards and began rummaging for pots and pans.

“I’m not hungry,” John said.

“I know.” Harry pulled out a saucepan, squinted into it, and took it to the sink to scrub.

“Harry, I’m not fit for company. I can’t talk about it even with people I actually like.”

Harry shut off the water, came around the end of the counter, and crouched down in front of his chair. The expression on her face baffled him. He was still getting used to Sober Harry. She was familiar to him, but as if from childhood. As if they had parted fifteen years ago and stayed Facebook friends but never met since.

“You don’t like me,” Harry said. “You don’t trust me. We’re not close. I know. That’s not what I’m here for. I’m not your mate, I’m not your therapist. I’m your sister. I haven’t been very good at it. But you need someone. And I am what you have left.”

John closed his eyes and turned his head away. It was all he had the energy to do.

“John?” he heard her say. “Do you have any paper for the loo? Besides this, I mean.”

He looked. She was brandishing a tabloid paper at him, printed with SUICIDE OF FAKE GENIUS. He had stolen hundreds of the horrible things out of newspaper boxes all along Baker Street. It gave him some satisfaction to see the boxes looking so empty and stupid; but they filled up again so quickly. He kept them in a stack next to the toilet now.

“No,” he said.

“I’ll add it to the list.”

Noises came and went and blurred. Minutes or days or seasons or whatever later, a smell drifted toward him, spiced and salty.

His eyes opened. He was staring at the table. The gun was gone. So was the bottle. The computer had been pushed to one side. In front of him there was a bowl of mulligatawny and a spoon.

He picked up the spoon mechanically with one hand. With the other, he reached the keypad, and moved the arrow over the button that said “SAVE AS DRAFT.”

* * * *

“I WALKED FORTY-SEVEN MILES OF BARBED WIRE GOT A COBRA SKIN FOR A NECKTIE…”

An earsplitting burst of George Thorogood tore out of Harry’s phone, neatly severing John’s train of thought. Just as well. That train always terminated at the same station.

Harry pressed the talk button and, with a glare that could ignite magnesium, pressed it to her ear. “Clara.”

John groaned.

Harry waved at him to shush.

“What stage is it? And what grade?”

John struggled into a sitting position on the couch. He could make no sense of the muted sounds from the phone, and Harry’s expression had become impassive.

“What?” Harry’s voice rang out. “Why me?”

There was no food in the immediate vicinity and no smell of cooking. This meant it was probably not breakfast time, lunch time, supper time, or teatime. About two weeks after That Day he had lost the capacity to keep track of time. Since Harry came he seemed to be relearning it, slowly.

“There are forms for that you can download online.”

John stopped on his way to the fridge. Harry’s body was compressed into something tense, burning, and dangerous, and the phone looked as if it might be crushed into dust any moment.

“It’s not simple, not with your assets. It takes hours. You and me talking about money for hours, sorry, no. We’d kill each other. I can refer you to—“

Don’t do it, John thought, drifting over to the window. Whatever it is.

“All right. Fine. When. Five o’clock. Great. Goodbye.”

She punched the hangup icon as if trying to drive it through the phone and out the other side.

“I’m not even going to start,” John began.

“Yes you are.”

Harry put the phone on the arm of the couch and rubbed both eyes with one hand.

“What did you just do?” John demanded.

“I agreed to go out to the house in Norwood tonight at five o’clock and help Clara make her will.”

“What?” John shouted.

“That’s exactly what I said.”

“Why you?”

“Oh my God, it’s uncanny.”

“Harry--”

“I am a lawyer, John. Wills and estates. She knows that. She did live with me for five years.”

“She’s your ex. There are other lawyers.”

“Of course there are. This is just….well, she’s dying, or at least she believes she’s dying, and you can’t expect Clara not to milk that.”

“Dying?”

“Just been diagnosed with breast cancer, she says. I too am skeptical.”

“But you’re going out there.”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

“Step nine.”

“Which step is that?”

“Making direct amends to the persons I have harmed whenever possible, except when to do so would injure others.”

Harry shoved the phone into her pocket.

“So that’s what this is, then,” John said, gesturing at the kitchen. “Step nine.”

Harry shook her head. “Nothing to do with it. I have loads of people I’ve harmed to make amends to before I get round to you.”

Harry moved to the kitchen. It hadn’t taken her more than a week to have that kitchen in shape. You could see the benchtops. They were covered in hideous tangerine plastic, but it was nice to have a clean unbroken surface to rest his eyes on.

“I’ll make dinner now and you can reheat it,” she said.

He saw her lifting something out of the meat drawer.

“Is it that chicken garlicky thing?”

He was surprised by the eagerness in his voice. So was Harry. She turned around.

“Sorry,” she said. “I know you loved it. But I don’t cook with wine now.”

“Right.”

“Listen, John…”

She put the pan and the packet of chicken pieces down on the counter. Her hands rose, fell, went silent.

“This is not about making amends,” she finally said. “I can’t think of any way to make amends to you. Can you? No really. I’m asking. Because if you can, tell me.”

They watched each other’s faces. He’d never thought that Harry looked much like any of them; but with the glasses and the new haircut there was, somewhere about the eyes and forehead, almost a whisper of their mother’s ghost. What she saw in his, he had no idea.

John finally said, “Nothing comes to mind.”

Harry nodded, and turned to the chicken.

“Speaking of wills,” she said. “I need to talk to you about Sherlock’s.”

Hearing the name still made his throat close up.

“Sherlock’s what?” he said, when he could talk.

“His will. It’s been proved now, and…” She saw the blank stare. “Oh no. He didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?” John croaked.

“I made his will for him. I’m his executor.”

Fantastic. Typical. Prick.

“No,” said John bitterly. “No, oddly enough, my best friend never told me that he’d asked my estranged sister to help him draw up a financial plan for his imminent suicide.”

Harry took a sharp knife out of a knife block which John could swear he’d never seen in that kitchen before. “It wasn’t like that,” she said, reaching for the lemons in the fruit bowl that had also somehow materialized without his noticing. “He came in ages ago. It was right after the whole thing with the bomb and the pool and that lunatic.”

John felt something zing through his veins. Could be anger, could be hatred, could be something else. Harry bisected a lemon, and started telling the story.

John found that if he closed his eyes, he could almost see it. He could see Harry’s poky little carpeted office in that shabby Norwood business centre, the beige walls, the mahogany-veneered furniture. And there was Sherlock, apologizing for turning up early for his appointment, throwing himself into the chair, leaving Harry standing behind her desk, one hand extended. He was, for some reason, dressed up like Lestrade on holiday—khakis, loafers, shirt open at the neck, maybe even some sort of spray tan. And he’d given Harry a fake name.

_“Now then, Mr….Donovan,” said Harry, rather dubiously, as Sherlock’s eyes roamed the litter on her desk. Water bottle, mobile, wrappers from the fish and chips she’d bought down the street to eat at her desk. “Did you have a chance to look at the questionnaire I—“_

_Sherlock began coughing, then hacking. His face turned red. His eyes bulged._

_“Are you all right?” Harry said. “Can you speak?”_

_Sherlock gestured frantically. “If I just—water—“_

_“Of course.” Harry picked up the bottle, popped the cap, and handed it to him. Sherlock guzzled it gratefully, then put it back on the table._

_“Ah, that hit the spot,” he said. “I do apologize. A touch of postnasal discharge. I thought I’d pulled through it, but actually, I don’t feel at all well. Would you mind terribly if we postponed our meeting to another day?”_

_Harry said, “I don’t know. Did you get what you were after, Mr. Holmes?”_

Though Harry was doing her best to make the story vivid, John couldn’t quite _see_ the expression on Sherlock’s face. Too bad; he would have enjoyed it.

_“I don’t like Holmes, it reminds me of Mycroft,” Sherlock said. “Call me Sherlock. How did you know?”_

_“I do read John’s blog.”_

_“Yes, but he doesn’t post photos of me. Of course he tries, but since his laptop is my bondslave and creature it never works for long. It was the water bottle, wasn’t it?”_

_“It was everything,” Harry said. “You made the appointment for just after lunchtime and you arrived early. Having verified that I was not in fact out getting sozzled at the local pub or tippling behind my office door, you barged in, spent more time looking at my hands than my face, and then faked a dry cough to get a swig at my water bottle, presumably in order to find out whether I’m hiding a martini in there.”_

_“Not a martini,” Sherlock replied. “You’re too clever for that. The olive would be visible even through tinted plastic.”_

_“The point is,” Harry replied, “you had better be Sherlock Holmes, because if John sent anyone else to do this job I’m going to have to go up to London and kill him.”_

_“What job?”_

_“Come on. I told John I’m sober, he doesn’t believe me, he sent you down here to catch me out.”_

_“Please,” Sherlock said. “Nobody _sends me_ anywhere. The water bottle was overkill, I grant you. I should have trusted your cufflinks.”_

_“My cufflinks,” said Harry._

John’s stomach gave a lurch. It knew what was coming.

_“Silver, fairly new, very tasteful but not a major investment. Not a present; your parents are gone. John never gets you anything and you’ve given away everything from Clara. You bought them for yourself, so business is looking up, which might be enough for some bunglers to conclude you were clean but you’ve always been high-functioning so we go on. Cuffs pressed by a laundry, still in pristine condition, edges of the buttonholes show no major signs of stress despite the fact that you put these cold, slippery cufflinks in every morning which is tricky to do one-handed especially at at time when if you were in fact coming off a bender your hands would still be shaky, so no, I didn’t need the water bottle. That’s the problem with disguise. It always tempts one to overact.”_

_“Could be someone else puts the cufflinks in for me,” Harry shot back._

_“No.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Two rings on the right hand. None on the left right now—of course there was one once, you can still see the callus—but the point is you wear no other jewelry. You’re proud of your hands, even a little vain about them, why not, they’re your best feature, John’s too if he only knew it. You’ve had regular manicures in the past—nothing fancy, a trim and a coat of clear polish—but not this month or the month before that. What’s the point, nobody to impress, even on a casual basis, so. You live alone, and—“_

“STOP!” John heard himself screaming. “Oh my God, will you just STOP!”

“John?”

Balled up as he was on the ratty sofa that had come with the place, his eyes squeezed shut, the pillow over his head to shut out the sound of Sherlock’s voice, no, Harry’s voice, but too close, too damn like.

He felt Harry’s hand, warm on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Two weeks of hot food had infused John’s bitterness with just enough gratitude to make him sit up, wipe his eyes, and say, “Not your fault.”

Harry waited.

“It’s…I…you were doing him doing that thing that he…”

“Yes,” Harry said. “I remember it all. It was mesmerizing.”

“I loved the way he did that,” John burst out, angry about his burning eyes and his breaking voice. “It was…from the first day…and it wasn’t ever real, it was a lie, it was a stupid conjuring trick…”

“John.” He was looking into Harry’s eyes, because she had him by the shoulders, steadying him so he wouldn’t collapse back onto the couch. “Why in God’s name would you of all people believe that shite in the tabloids?”

“Sherlock told me so himself!”

Harry took in a slow, anxious breath.

“Told you when?”

It came out. Hating Harry still, he spilled it anyway. It tore out of him on its own, the cab stopping, the phone ringing, his eyes traveling straight to that long tall shadow standing erect on the roof, at the edge but unafraid. The note. The fall. The crash. Everything. Because whatever about him and Harry, it would kill him if it couldn’t get told.

She sat and listened to him try to get control. This was a new thing with Sober Harry. Not always having to talk.

“No wonder,” she finally whispered.

“No wonder what?” John demanded, wiping at the tears that would not stop coming.

“No wonder you’re this fucked up.”

“Fuck you, Harry. _I watched him die._ Even you would grieve.”

Harry winced just a little. “This isn’t just grief. John…he can’t have meant it. It doesn’t make any sense. What he told you in that conversation just cannot be literally true.”

“It is,” John shouted.

She was truly, deeply distressed. That baffled him. He wouldn’t have thought anyone else could be as shocked by Sherlock’s fall as he’d been.

“John, you lived with him. How often did he do that whole deduce-your-life thing?”

“Constantly.”

Harry made a noise of exasperation. “It can’t possibly have been the Google _every time_.”

“Harry, I go through it in my own mind all day every day. I’m sick of it. Sherlock invented Moriarty…”

“And what, he invented a syndicate of Chinese gangsters too? He invented a secret chemical weapons experiment in Liberty, Indiana? And that freaky thing with the aluminium crutch? Sherlock invented that serial-killing cabbie with the poison pill roulette? If _that_ bastard wasn’t real, what the hell did you shoot?”

“How do I know what they were doing?”John burst out. “I thought he was trying to kill Sherlock. What if it was the other way around?”

Harry stared at him, dumbfounded.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Sherlock has changed your narrative.”

“What?” John demanded.

“The narrative. Jury trials. You give the jury the story you want them to believe. If you get them into that story, then the opposing counsel can introduce whatever evidence they want and it won’t matter because no matter what they will interpret it as confirmation of that narrative. I can go through the five hundred examples that are in my brain right now all competing for the chance to show you how this conclusion you’ve come to is totally and utterly wrong, but it wouldn’t make any difference because you’re believing _Sherlock_ ’s narrative, which is graven upon your heart in flaming letters of trauma. I can’t talk you out of it now. Nobody can. He made sure of that. That miserable FUCKER!”

There were a lot of things that had happened in the last several minutes that didn’t make sense. Harry standing up for Sherlock was one of them. The fact that Harry was standing up for Sherlock by calling him a miserable fucker at the top of her lungs was less surprising. That particular blend of emotions was achingly familiar.

“Listen to me,” Harry said. “I don’t know why he decided to spend his last moments on earth doing this to you. The fact that he did it expertly and completely in such a short amount of time tells me it was planned although who knows, if he thought it was the only way to protect you he could improvise a sodding cathedral with nothing but a box of matches and sellotape. John—no, John, look—“

And John was crying again. Because he was looking at the roof again and there Sherlock was and it was him and not him, it was the Sherlock he’d lived with and the Sherlock who’d died, it was Sherlock the genius and Sherlock the fake and Sherlock the man he had loved and not loved and known and not known and it was too much and he couldn’t look or listen any more.

“You don’t know!” John screamed. “You met him once! What do you know?”

“I made his will, John.”

John blinked at the white object Harry was holding in front of him. It was a paper napkin picked up in the dining car of some train. On it was scrawled, in pencil, “Everything goes to John. Signed, Sherlock Holmes.” Dated…just about a week after the bomb and the pool and Moriarty, back when Moriarty was real.

“That’s his will?” John said.

“That’s what _he_ thought,” Harry snorted. “That’s what he brought into my office that day, instead of the flipping questionnaire. Of course he wanted to know if I was really sober before trusting me with _this_ precious document, which for Christ’s sake is not even witnessed. That’s what the disguise was about. If I turned out not to be sober, I guess he was planning to leave and not come back. Oh and the water bottle, turns out that was another test. He wanted to see if I’d figure him out.”

“Why?” John demanded.

“Well, as he put it, ‘I can’t have a complete gormless idiot for my attorney.’”

John almost laughed with him. Or rather with his ghost.

Harry rummaged in her case and pulled out a binder-clipped pile of paper at least an inch thick.

“ _This_ bad boy is the last will and testament of Sherlock Holmes.”

“Jesus,” said John, as Harry slapped it down on the table.

“And the pisser is, basically, it says what the napkin says—only in such a way that your friend’s estate will not be tied up in court for twenty years because Sherlock couldn’t be bothered to, say, include your full name. I would say it is curious that he should draw up so important a document in so haphazard a fashion, but this would seem to be Sherlock in a nutshell: be extraordinary at the things that only you can do, and be utterly incompetent at the ones that other people will eventually do for you.”

“In a nutshell,” John echoed.

“He did in fact leave you nearly everything. There is a small bequest for Mrs. Hudson and he left Mycroft any cadavers or pieces thereof he might have in his possession at the time of his death—“

It had been a long time since John had heard himself laugh.

“—along with a box full of documents. But you get the scientific equipment, all the case files, and of course the liquid assets.”

“Which would be what, a cup of coffee and a bottle of formaldehyde?” John said.

Harry cleared her throat.

“Sherlock was worth over a hundred thousand pounds when he died.”

“How?” John stammered.

Harry had finished whatever it was she was doing to the chicken. She put the casserole dish in the oven and set the timer. She came round to the living area, opened her case, and took out two large brown envelopes. One was marked JOHN. The other was marked INSPECTOR LESTRADE.

“The financial details we can go over later,” she said. “To me the question is why, since he was worth all that, he went on sharing with you in that Baker Street rathole. But the most baffling thing of all,” she said, “is these two envelopes.”

John had recognized Sherlock’s handwriting right away, but his throat was closing up on him again.

“They arrived in my office the day he died,” Harry went on. “I’ve been trying since I came up here to deliver the one addressed to Inspector Lestrade. Take my advice, John: if you’re ever down at the Yard again, don’t mention Sherlock’s name. You won’t like what happens. This one, dear brother, is for you, and I’m dying to know what’s in it; but of course, not till you’re ready.”

“I’m not ready,” John said.

Harry nodded. “Well, it’s there for when you are. Now I have to go gird my loins for my battle with Clara’s financial chaos,” she went on. “It’ll be a nightmare. She sank most of her money—and some of my money, I would like to point out—into the housing market at exactly the worst time imaginable. She must own a dozen houses in the greater London area. All abandoned in the middle of the remodeling process when the world economy imploded. All empty, and all extremely hard to put a monetary value on right now.”

Harry threw on her black leather jacket, grabbed her keys, and hoisted a heavy and clanking black purse onto one shoulder. She looked at him with a kind of pity that John was beginning to find very irritating.

“You know, John…when you make someone's will, you always ask the client to designate two or three alternate heirs, in case something happens to the first one. But Sherlock absolutely refused to name anyone. He simply would not accept the possibility. I said to him, look, if you die while you’re on a case, which is what you’re really planning for, it’s a good bet that John will die the same way and at the same time…and you should have seen his face. His own death, Sherlock could face. The thought of _you_ dying was unbearable to him.”

Funny that, John thought. For me it’s the other way round.

“I WALKED FORTY-SEVEN MILES OF BARBED WIRE—“

Cursing, Harry grabbed the phone and silenced it viciously. “All right!” she shouted at its inert form. “I’m doing your bidding, just SHUT UP!”

John felt the thought of a smile cross his mind.

Harry seemed to feel it too. “Whatever else you regret, John,” she said, with a self-mocking smile, “don’t regret not having had sex with him. Trust me when I say that friends to lovers is not always an upgrade.”

She was out the door before he could answer.

* * *

He ate the chicken. He looked at the envelope.

He brushed his teeth. He looked at the envelope.

He lay in bed trying to sleep. He thought about taking his tablets. He didn’t. He told himself he wasn’t going to get out of bed and go look at the fucking envelope.

One in the morning. Two in the morning. Three. Four. Still not asleep.

At seven o’clock he got out of bed, staggered to the living area, and tore open the envelope.

John tipped it upside down. All that fell out of it was a smaller envelope, about the size of a business card. JOHN was written on the outside of that one, too.

Just “John.” Not even “to my good friend…”

To hell with it.

John ripped the envelope open. The card inside was cream-colored, stiff, embossed at the edges. Must have cost a packet. It surprised him that Sherlock owned stationery. Come to think of it, John had hardly ever seen him use a pen.

The card had three words written on it, in Sherlock’s flamboyant all-caps. They didn’t, at first, make sense. Because what they said was, “MARY WAS DRIVING.”

It wasn’t until he saw the letters dancing that John realized his hand was shaking.

He flipped the card over. On the back, in smaller print, it said, “Get laptop, open browser, type in MARIANHARRY1512.”

December 15. The date of the accident.

John had never told Sherlock about Mary. Certainly Harry wouldn’t have.

John reached for his laptop.

The door slammed. And suddenly Harry was in the room, leaning against the closed door for support, with a face as white as a sheet.

“Harry?” John said. Because John had seen exactly that look of terror and panic in Harry’s eyes the night of the crash, and he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t hallucinating her now.

Harry threw her purse onto the couch, grabbed her hair with both hands, and tried to slow down her unusually rapid breathing.

“Harry, what is it?”

Harry swallowed something. She blinked. She thrust out her hands toward him.

“You’ve got to help me, John. I don’t have much time.”

“Harry? What on earth’s happened to you?”

Harry grabbed her mobile out of her pocket, punched up something, and tossed it to him.

_GRUESOME MURDER IN OLD ACRES. The body of a woman found burned to bone and cinder on the grounds of a stately home in the secluded Old Acres development just outside Norwood is presumed to be that of estate agent and socialite Clara Adair. Adair, who witnesses say was visited last evening by former partner Harriet Watson…_

“Christ!” John shouted.

Harry was perched on the edge of the sofa, tearing through her purse. She rattled a set of keys at him.

“Here,” she said. “They're for my car. I left it in a car park in Knightsbridge. Here’s the ticket. I wrote down the floor and the section.”

“Harry…what happened?”

“What happened?” Harry demanded, panic suddenly blazing into fury. “What happened is, I let that woman ruin my life for what looks to be the last time.”

"Why do I need keys to your car?" John asked.

"Because your fucking _gun_ is in the glove box."

"So that's where you hid it."

"Well I couldn't leave it at the hotel and if I'd hidden it here you'd have found it if you went looking, and...oh Christ almighty, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but..."

“Harry. Harry, you have to go to police."

“I’m afraid the police will be coming to me. Soon."

Harry took off her leather jacket and threw it across the room. It landed on the kitchen floor.

“All right.” John grabbed Harry by the wrist as she rushed by. Harry turned to face him. He could feel her pulse racing.

“Let’s just…” John said, taking her other hand. “Let’s just calm down. Tell me what happened.”

“I’m her ex,” Harry cried. “I was out at the house last night. I have a history of substance abuse. And of course we slept together so they’ll find her hair and fibers all over me. Why did I fall for it, John? Why did I ever go down there? How can she be dead? How can she be dead, just like that?”

Her whole face was wet and crumpled and her voice was high and strained. He hadn’t seen her this upset since Mary’s funeral. She still loved Clara, in spite of it all. Apparently they were like that, the Watsons. Fall once, fall hard, break up maybe but never let go.

“Did you…you didn’t…”

“No!” Harry shouted. “I stayed…we were in our old bed, and then I woke up at around four in the morning and she wasn’t there. I got up, I looked around—“

The door vibrated on its hinges. The pounding on the other side was sudden, and loud, and it sounded depressingly familiar.

“Police! Open up!”

Harry collapsed onto the couch, her face sunk into her hands.

John pocketed Harry’s keys and her phone and went to the door. “Lestrade, give me just a minute—

The lock snapped. The door swung open. Two uniformed officers swarmed in and went straight for poor Harry. Lestrade followed, his boots trampling a brown envelope that had slipped to the floor.

“Greg, please—“

Lestrade’s eyes never wavered from Harry’s cowering form. “Get her up,” he barked.

The two officers hauled her to her feet. One of them confiscated her bag. Harry seemed to be trying to resign herself to the situation. It only made John more upset.

“Harriet Watson, you are under arrest for the willful murder of Clara Adair. It is my duty to warn you that anything you say will be used against you at trial.”

“I understand,” Harry said, faintly.

Lestrade still wouldn't look at him. “She was telling me the story, Greg," John said. "Couldn’t you let her finish? You can stay and listen, and then—“

Lestrade turned on him, furiously.

“I’m finished listening to you!”

It was only now that John saw Sergeant Donovan in the doorway, looking on with grim satisfaction. And that behind her, in the hallway, was Anderson.

And then John felt Lestrade’s hands on his shoulders, and felt his back slam into the wall, and saw Lestrade’s handsome face contort in a snarl of pure hatred.

“He’s dead,” Lestrade spat. “You’re dead to me.”

Lestrade turned away, erasing John from his field of vision. “Donovan, search him."

" _What?!"_ John replied.

Donovan said, "Assume the position."

"Sod off!"

"Sir, can I arrest him?"

Lestrade, on the other side of the tangerine countertop, was busy going through the pockets of Harry's jacket. "Ask him again, and if he doesn't, then yes."

"Turn around and put your hands on the wall above your head," said Donovan, with relish.

John stifled the masses of profanity that were thronging to mind, and assumed the position.

"Keys and a mobile," Donovan finally reported.

Harry studiously did not look up.

"They're mine," John said. "Harry's mobile is there on the counter."

Anderson picked it up with his blue-gloved hand. It did say, right on the case, "Harry Watson, from Clara." Anderson put it in a bag, and handed the bag to Lestrade.

Unbeliveable. All these months and how many times had he used that mobile in front of them and they never even saw her name on it. And Sherlock picked it up, sent a text, handed it back thirty seconds later, and still saw...all that...

Google or no Google. Sherlock _saw_ all those things...and Lestrade was just going out the door with the wrong mobile in his evidence bag.

"Take her downstairs," Lestrade said. "Anderson, give the place a thorough going-over. She’s been here at least ten minutes, she’s had plenty of time to dump the weapon.”

The two officers led Harry out of the apartment. John ran after them. Down the hall, down the stairs, out to the street beyond, to take a last look at her red, tear-stained face as they opened the back door of the car.

“Don’t worry,” John called out to her. “I’ll sort it out. I promise.”

Harry opened her mouth to answer. But they shoved her in before she could; and all he heard was a high, desperate, disappearing wail.

His heart twisted oddly as he watched the car drive away. It had been so long since he had been sorry to see her go.

He realized he hadn’t even told Harry about the envelope. About the three words that meant—if Sherlock wasn’t, after all, a fraud—that she was done with step nine after all.

END CHAPTER

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter seemed lonely without a note, so...
> 
> People write fanfiction for different reasons. This story happened because after seeing how miserable John was at the end of "Reichenbach Fall," I couldn't stand the idea that he would be stuck in that place until all the planets lined up for the beginning of production on Season 3; so I did the only thing I could do about it, which was write my own story about how he gets out of it. 
> 
> I was not that far into it when I realized that actually, what was driving the writing of this story was the experience of watching my own brother go through a hideous and psychologically devastating loss a few years ago. He's fine now, but I'll never forget those first weeks and I'm sure he hasn't either. I would dedicate this story to him, but boy would he not understand.
> 
> In Joan Didion's _The Year of Magical Thinking_ , she quotes Emily Post on the topic of what to do for bereaved people. If you ask them whether they're hungry, Post says, they will always say no; but if you just put food in front of them, they'll eat it. This, I have discovered, is true; and that's why Harry spends so much time cooking in the first chapter. Then it wound up becoming a thing for her character.


	2. MIXED MESSAGES

In the back of the cab, on his way to that Knightsbridge car park, John pulled out Harry’s mobile and started going through it. The fact that Harry herself was being processed into a prison cell right now was something he had trouble pushing to the back of his mind. You were right, Sherlock, he thought. Caring. It doesn’t help.

Clara was all over Harry’s phone. She accounted for more than half of Harry’s missed calls in the past month. He found the record of the call Harry had taken in the apartment yesterday. He also found a long stream of text messages going back to two days _before_ that conversation—all coming in from Clara, and all getting no response. That is, until yesterday at 2:16pm, when Clara’s text _Please come. I don’t have much time left. I need your help and it’s not something I can discuss via text_ was met with the reply, _The texting device you currently hold in your hand is in fact a fully functional phone._ And it was at 2:17 that Clara’s phone call finally came in, filling his tiny apartment with George Thorogood’s vocal stylings. And another call at 3:34, just before Harriet left the apartment to drive down to Norwood.

And then nothing, until 4:23 a.m. A text that said, _all right not funny where the fuck are you_. 

Call made at 4:24a.m. No answer.

4:25am, another text: _slipping out before dawn after a regrettable liaison is not original but only you would try sneaking out of your own house_

4:38am: _sod step nine this is the last time you will ever play your games with me_

No more texts after that. One call, made at 4:51…to the fire brigade.

John put the phone in sleep mode and stared into space. 

They hadn’t let Harry finish her story. But from the news he had the basic details. The body had been found at 5:15am when the fire brigade responded to a call indicating a suspicious fire on the grounds of 354 Jonas Drive in Old Acres, Norwood. That house had an enormous lawn, and one of its ornaments was an artificial river that fed into a shallow pond lined with concrete. The pool had been drained two weeks earlier for maintenance, and the day and night of the murder had been bone dry. From the lack of blood in the house itself, the working hypothesis seemed to be that Clara had been forced into empty pond and then shot there. Her body had been doused with petrol and set ablaze. The accelerant did its job; by the time the fire brigade arrived, the fire had burned out, and all that was left was a cloud of foul-smelling black smoke and a twisted skein of bone and cinder in roughly the shape of a human body. They had identified the body by its jewelry—more specifically, by the yellow diamond ring that Harry had given Clara for her birthday one year. The white-gold band and setting were fused around the fourth finger of the corpse’s bony left hand. Harry had always called that ring the Moonstone. It had belonged to their mother. It had come to Harry after her death, and so it was Harry’s to do with what she liked; but John had always resented her giving that ring away. Especially to Clara. 

Clara. Until Mary, she’d been Harry’s biggest mistake. 

The attraction John understood. He had fancied Clara himself. Blonde, glamorous, beautifully shaped, not well-read or bookish in the slightest but sharp enough to cut glass. And she was always an adventure. Clara came from money, had plenty of her own, and could never quite believe that she might one day be without it. For Clara, money was not something that paid for goods and services; it was her ticket of entry to a vast and thrilling game of chance involving properties, mortgages, derivatives…when the banking scandals started coming to light years ago, John’s first reaction had been to wonder whether anyone was investigating Clara.

That might have been all right. But love was a game for Clara too; and to hold her interest, a game had to be risky. Harry had played along—the drinking made her intriguingly volatile and, in her remorseful periods, easy to manipulate—until something had finally made her decide to get sober and get out. John did not believe it was pure coincidence that Harry gave up drinking and Clara at around the same time. What a shame that Harry had been more successful at staying sober than at staying away from Clara.

So, Harry had gone out to help Clara make her will…and had gone to bed with her. Nasty as the breakup had been, it had evidently done nothing to kill the spark. John assumed that must just be how one of these opposites-attract things worked. About the only thing Harry and Clara ever had in common was drinking.

They’d gone to bed…and in the middle of the night, Clara disappeared. And Harry got up, went looking for her, sent those baffled and hurt and angry texts, and then wandered out onto the grounds. She saw the flames leaping out of the empty frog pond and immediately dialed the fire brigade. And then she must have gone closer and seen what was burning. And then she panicked, and ran to her car, and was on the road and gone before the truck arrived.

The cab stopped. John paid the driver, tipping well in just in case he was a serial killer, and got out. The car park was enormous. Harry’s car was all the way up on the roof level. John went up in the lift, nervous all the way. He had to get there before the police did. He was going to need that revolver.

Because, he thought, as the lift doors opened, whoever _did_ kill Clara obviously had some experience. In addition to neatly framing Harriet, the Real Killer(s) had disposed of the body quickly and efficiently and in such a way that it would be very difficult to recover any forensic evidence worth having. Something very cold-blooded was going on here.

John began scanning the rows of cars, looking for Harry’s cream-colored Honda Civic. There were dozens on dozens of cars on that rooftop, all glittering in a rare moment of full sun; but it was easy enough to spot Harry’s. It was right at the end of a row; and there was a dark gray sedan parked next to it. And the Honda’s passenger-side door was open. And a man’s arm extended from that open door; and from that man’s latex-coated fingertips dangled a black revolver belonging to one Dr. John H. Watson, late of Her Majesty’s army.

John faded back into the shadow thrown by one of the pylons and watched the man who had found his gun emerge from the car. 

He was thin, and tall, wearing a dark suit and dark glasses. And he was somehow familiar. John knew he’d seen him before. But since he wasn’t Sherlock, he couldn’t remember where. John didn’t have a mind palace. He didn’t have so much as a mind bungalow.

The thin man got into the gray car, and backed it out of the parking space.

That’s all this day needed, John thought. Somebody has my gun. And I suppose I’d better hope that it’s the police.

* * * *

Between the enormous individual properties that made up Old Acres there rambled an irregular tangle of trees and underbrush that gave the occupants an inflated sense of privacy to go with their inflated mortgages. It was no jungle, but it provided enough cover to allow John to approach Clara’s house unseen from the north-northeast, far away from the police tape stretched across the entrance to their long and winding drive. From his position at the top of an artificial ridge that rose at the boundary between two properties, screened in by the shrubbery, he could train his long-range field glasses on the beige brick walls of Clara’s McMansion.

It was an architectural monstrosity, like all of these houses; a squatting, four-bedroom hulk with an attached garage, kitted out with features from half a dozen different ‘classic’ periods of British architecture, from the Gothic arch over the front doorway to the Victorian turret that rose from the second storey. The effect once created by the immaculate landscaping was ruined now by an assortment of vehicles, tarps, police tape, and other detritus. Lestrade was inside the house, popping into view occasionally as he went through the rooms on the northern side. At the moment, Lestrade was combing through the master bath.

Through the glasses, John saw him open the frosted door to the shower, inspect the tiles, and go through the drawers in the vanity. Then he flushed the toilet. Something that happened caught Lestrade’s attention. John saw him lift off the top of the toilet tank, and then fish around in the water with his gloved hand.

Lestrade’s eyes lit up. He had something.

John watched Lestrade’s hand come dripping out of the toilet tank. And once again, there was John’s gun, dangling at the end of someone else’s arm.

Arresting as that sight was, John turned his attention to Lestrade’s face.

The look of triumph was gone. Lestrade was staring at the glistening metal in his hand with an expression that John felt might look very much like the look on his own face right now. Something in the eyebrows and the wrinkling of Lestrade’s forehead said, quite plainly, _this is not right._

All the same, Lestrade left the room, gun in gloved hand, and disappeared temporarily from view. 

The sun was going down when Lestrade finally emerged from the house, trailed by Donovan and Anderson. It was maddening not to be able to hear their conversation. As Donovan and Anderson got into their car, Lestrade stopped, taking a look round. He called to them and waved for them to go on. They drove away. Lestrade strode up the lawn, passing the three techs who were still crawling around picking bits of ash up in the scorched frog pond, and toward the woods.

He’d seen something.

As the twilight fell, John moved backward into the brush, taking care to rustle as he went. Lestrade quickened his pace. John found an oak tree with a stout limb branching off the trunk about five feet up and swung himself onto it.

He lay there for a few minutes, watching Lestrade try to move stealthily toward him. For a moment John was afraid he would start giggling. It suddenly all seemed very Winnie-the-Pooh. A wood that wasn’t really a wood, and Lestrade trampling through it like some overgrown Christopher Robin, and that would make John Tigger, wouldn’t it, up in the treetop ready to pounce.

Lestrade approached the tree, looking the wrong way.

John’s body slammed into Lestrade’s with a shock that half-winded him. John got his arms locked around Lestrade’s chest, pinning his upper arms to his torso. Lestrade pitched sideways. John was on his back in the dead leaves, breathing the smell of rot while Lestrade’s weight crushed even more air out of his lungs. John unlocked his arms. Lestrade sprang up, drew back, and landed a punch on John’s head. 

The sting and the dizziness drove John insane. Before he quite knew what had happened, Lestrade had his back against the tree, and John could feel Lestrade’s blood pumping beneath his thumbs, which were jammed into either side of Lestrade’s neck under the angles of the jaw. Evidently John’s body had risen up and gained the advantage. Evidently, his hands were now halfway to throttling Lestrade.

“Jesus!” Lestrade gasped. “Tell me what you want. _What do you want?_ ”

John forced his hands to relax their hold. It took a minute.

“I want you to talk to me,” was what came out.

“Then let go of my throat.”

John let go. Lestrade didn’t punch him, or pull his gun, or run. He took a few ragged and rather desperate breaths, and said, “You’re a dangerous bloody man, Dr. Watson.”

“What in hell is going on?” John blurted.

Lestrade’s mouth twitched in a half-smile, and he let out a soft chuckle.

“I wish I knew, John.”

It was all back to normal. It was all so strange.

“What was all that back at the—“

“Not now,” Lestrade said, “and not here. And clear out, because if anyone finds you lurking here they’ll have you in a cell right next to Harry before you know what you’re at.” 

Lestrade reached inside his jacket, but all he pulled out was a crumpled receipt. He scribbled something on it and stuffed it into John’s trouser pocket. Then he made his way back through the bracken and down the slope toward the frog pond. 

John removed the crumpled receipt and strained to make out the faint print. It was from Ezra’s Eatery, 204 Laudate Way, Lower Norwood. Lestrade had purchased a cup of coffee and a cheese and onion sandwich there at 1:30pm. Next to the name of the restaurant, Lestrade had written, “Great place for dinner.”

John took one last look at the hideous house. There were still lights on in the turret. Two windows glowing at him. Two yellow eyes shining in a face behind which, he had a creepy feeling, some malevolent intelligence was pulsing.

* * *

Sitting in a brown vinyl-upholstered booth and sipping his fourth cup of terrible coffee, John reflected that the success of Ezra’s Eatery was a tragic indication of what Harry had sacrificed for her life with Clara. It was Clara who had wanted that mansion, Clara who had insisted on leaving London, and Clara who had the bright idea of Harry setting up a solo practice involving a deadly boring area of law in a deadly boring suburb. Harry was already drinking heavily when she met Clara; but by God, sticking it out in this place would have made anyone start.

He looked up from his empty cup to find Lestrade sidling onto the bench opposite him. He’d been somewhere in the meantime to brush the loam out of his hair and straighten his collar. Satisfied, apparently, with the level of ambient noise around them, and pleased that John had chosen a booth in the back which could not be seen directly from the door, Lestrade said, “Don’t get the shepherd’s pie. It’s pretty dense.”

“You would know,” John retorted.

“Listen,” Lestrade said, after the bored and sallow teenaged waitress had come and gone. “I’m sorry about the whole ‘dead to me’ thing.”

“You’ll need to do better than that. You told _Donovan_ to search me. If you were a gentleman at all you’d at least have seen to it yourself.”

“John, you wanted me to talk to you, so shut up for just a moment.”

Lestrade picked up his cup of coffee and looked at it with a weary sigh.

“Someone on the force has it in for Sherlock.”

“I thought everyone on the force had it in for Sherlock.”

Lestrade shook his head. “Yeah, I’m not talking about the usual chronic barely-suppressed urge to punch him in the face.”

“Oh, so you felt it too,” John said. 

“I _invented_ that feeling,” Lestrade said, pointing a fork at him. “That special blend of exasperation, elation, and admiration you feel when you look into those glittering eyes and know that yes, you are about to solve the goddamn case, but only because, intellectually speaking, your arse has just been handed to you by Sherlock fucking Holmes. God, I miss it.”

“So do I,” John sighed.

“We shouldn’t be speaking ill of the poor beggar,” Lestrade said. “He got humiliated worse than any of us, in the end.”

The sallow waitress slapped down two plates and disappeared without a word.

Lestrade regarded his food with a look of mournful resignation, and began to poke at it.

“What I mean is,” he said, tucking in a sad-looking mouthful of egg, “someone higher up in the force. Someone who hasn’t actually had the pleasure of interacting with him. I have been told, explicitly, that cutting all ties with you and anyone else who ever worked with him is a condition of my continued employment.”

“Oh,” John said. “So you’re worried about your job. That’s why you treated me like a criminal and arrested my sister. Thanks, that explains it all. You prick.”

“And I no longer have access to any of the files from any of the cases we worked on together.”

John blinked. 

“They exist somewhere in the system, I hope,” Lestrade said. “But I can’t get to them any more. Sherlock is being erased. And I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, John, but I can tell you right now I’ll be keeping up the act in future—especially in front of Donovan and Anderson, who are insufferably pleased with themselves right now, and who I’m almost certain are spying on me for my superiors. Because if I’m sacked, who will ever be able to set the record straight?”

John finished washing down an ill-advised bite of his omelet.

“You mean…you don’t believe the…fraud…”

“I told you,” Lestrade said. “I worked with Sherlock long before he met you. I mean he’d kill me if he were alive to hear me say it, but I was his mentor. No, I was. Not intellectually, of course. But I was the one showing him how to _do_ something with this tremendous gift that he had. I mean I can’t take credit for making him human; that was you. But I do know that he wasn’t making it up all those years. There were too many cases and too many different kinds of evil in too many different places for him to have been responsible for _all_ of it. I just…the poor girl screaming at him like that, and Donovan…I wavered, John. I wavered, just for a few hours…and it was enough. The ball got rolling and I couldn’t stop it, even after I came to my senses.”

John opened his mouth to abuse him, but the text of that saved draft of his last blog post came to mind, and he took a bite of his dinner instead.

“Donovan’s not stupid. I respect her opinions. But about Sherlock, she’s always been wrong. My gut knows that. Just as my gut knows that this…” Lestrade gestured around him with his empty fork. “This case…it’s all wrong. I feel it in my bones. Everything points to Harry. But…well. I worked my way up from narcotics; I have to be quite honest seen some planted evidence in my day. But finding your revolver in the toilet tank today, that was a turn-up.”

“Especially since I saw someone in a dark gray car taking that gun out of Harry’s glove box earlier this morning,” John replied. 

“My goodness,” Lestrade said, leaning forward on both elbows and chewing, for once, with something approaching gusto. “Do tell.”

John told.

“Hm,” Lestrade said. “Well, that has to have been a police job. I put in a request to surveillance to find Harry’s car; evidently it was diverted to whoever’s in charge of blotting Sherlock and all who knew him out of the Book of Life.”

“I don’t see the point of it,” John said. “It’s not as if they don’t have a case against her without it.”

“Don’t you see,” Lestrade said. “Apart from yours truly, who has access to evidence that could prove that Sherlock was who we know he was? Well, Harry was his lawyer; she’s got all of Sherlock’s documents. And you’re the one who’s been keeping records of all Sherlock’s cases. Clara Adair shot by Harry with your gun dirties both of you in the public eye, and nothing you say afterward will matter.”

John pushed his plate away.

“So what else did you find in there?” he said.

“There was the will, of course—“

“What will?” John demanded. 

“The will where Clara left Harry everything. Signed and witnessed.”

“Well it can’t be the will Harry went down there to make out,” John said. “Because a, Harry wouldn’t ever have agreed to that, and b, there’s no way it could have been witnessed.”

“It did strike me as rather prominently placed on the living room table,” Lestrade allowed. “I’m telling you, John, I’ve been to a million crime scenes and this one stinks to high heaven."

Something Harry had said came back to John.

"Who was the alternate?"

"The what?" Lestrade said.

"The alternate. Harry says that there's always an alternate heir in case the first dies. If Harry had been convicted she wouldn't have been able to inherit. Who's the alternate? The person who would get the estate once Harry was disqualified?"

Lestrade thought, didn't know, and burst out in exasperation. "I don't know, John, I didn't read the thing cover to cover. The point of the will is to frame Harry. That's the point of everything at that crime scene. It’s not just the gun. This whole thing has been set up. I know that, I just can’t—“

An old-fashioned telephone ring blared out of Lestrade’s pocket. He took it out and looked at it.

“Sorry, it’s Donovan, I have to take this. Don’t make a sound.”

Lestrade put the phone to his ear. John was deliberating whether the satisfaction of grabbing the phone and telling Donovan where she could stick it was worth the havoc it would cause when Lestrade looked up at him abruptly and said, “ _What?_ Where?”

Lestrade started jotting things down on the back of a paper napkin.

"Discovered when? And how?"

John watched Lestrade's pen tap on the table, wishing he could just grab the phone himself.

"Are you quite sure it’s her?” Lestrade asked.

John put down his coffee cup.

“Well, are you quite sure she’s dead?” Lestrade retorted.

John signaled the waitress for the check.

“All right, I’ll be right there.” Lestrade hung up.

“What is it?” John asked.

Lestrade stared at him for a moment, fingers drumming on the napkin.

“Clara Adair’s just been murdered,” he said. “Again.”

“Again?”

“Police responding to an anonymous call found Clara Adair’s body in one of her vacant properties. Slumped in a chair with two bullets in her head.”

John shook his head.

“I know!” Lestrade shouted. “I know. But it definitely is Clara Adair, and she is dead for real and for true. Which is good news for Harry, let me tell you. But bad news, very bad news, for poor luckless, Sherlockless me.”

“Take me with you,” John murmured, as the waitress appeared with the check.

“Can’t.”

“Greg!”

Lestrade looked at the napkin, moved his lips briefly, and then pushed the napkin toward John.

“Don’t let anyone see you," Lestrade said, "and you didn't hear it from me.” 

“Right.” 

Lestrade clattered noisily to his feet, buttoning up his jacket.

On the napkin was written, "83 Palace Gardens Terrace. Discovered 6:35pm. Time of death no earlier than 6:00pm. Apparent sniper."

“Thanks," John called after him. 

But Lestrade’s back was to him, and he was halfway to the door already.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To amuse myself, I decided to put notes in about the other crime stories (apart from ACDs) that contributed to this story. If you're gonna write fiction about fiction, go meta. That's what I say.
> 
> The yellow diamond ring and the name of Ezra's Eatery are the only remnants of a whole thing that was going to be going on here with Wilkie Collins's novel The Moonstone. I love that novel. If you like ACD and have never read The Moonstone, I urge you to do it. There, now I don't have to clutter up the story with pointless Moonstone references.


	3. EASTER EGG

During the daytime, 83 Palace Gardens Terrace no doubt looked identical to its decorous neighbors. But with a battery of lights trained on it from either side of the slate steps, the twin white columns framing its front entrance glared like stripes on the back of some exotic beetle. It was a tall, narrow row house, attached on both sides to others just like it. Three storeys and a ground floor half-sunk below street level. All the windows facing the street had blinds drawn. There was a crowd of gapers gathering already.

Well, Clara, John thought, you couldn’t have picked a more genteel place to die.

He hung in the shadows at the back of the crowd, trying to get a good look at the entrance. On either side of the steps was a gravelled plot planted thickly with rhododendrons. They were starkly illuminated by the glare, and though the large, pointed leaves threw shadows like daggers, there was nothing to indicate that anyone had disturbed them recently. Either the shooter had been in the house with her, or he’s fired from somewhere else. The street was narrow; the houses opposite all had lights on, and in one or two of them he could see figures at the windows looking out. 

He could see a few shadows moving around behind the blinds on the first storey, where the drawing room would be. Donovan, Anderson, Lestrade, and who knows who else were in there milling about, doing things the Scotland Yard way. John couldn’t go in through the front door. He would have to do things the Sherlock way.

All right, he thought. What would Sherlock do?

John began edging away from the crowd, slipping down the curve until he found a cross-street took him through to the street behind the house. It was narrow too—little more than a laneway—and ran between two uneven stone walls that cordoned off the back gardens of the houses on either side of it. He stopped opposite number 83, pulled out his torch, and began examining the area.

Hard pavement underfoot, hard pebbly concrete in the walls. A tiny strip of dirt and grass running between the wall and the pavement, dry as a bone and yielding nothing apart from a gift left behind by someone’s dog.

John backed up to the opposite wall and craned his neck. There were lights in the windows on the third storey. The blinds were drawn there too. But one window had been opened, and John could see Lestrade silhouetted against that blind, looking into the room at something hidden from John’s view.

Probably Clara.

John picked up an imaginary rifle and tried to find the angle.

No. From where he stood, it couldn’t be done. The room was too high up and the street was too narrow. If she’d been shot by a sniper outside the house, he’d have had to be at a higher elevation. 

John turned around, backed up, and took a flying leap at the stone wall.

Ten minutes later, with his hands scraped raw, John made another deduction: anyone who had scaled either of the walls on either side of this laneway must have brought equipment. Or at least a ladder. 

Returning with a ladder he had liberated from an unprotected garden shed two blocks away, John scrambled up to the top of the wall farthest from Clara’s house. He could see more of the rear wall now. Ivy had claimed much of that wall, but there was a bare patch under the open window where someone seemed to have made a start at pulling it down. 

Perched on the wall, John brought out the imaginary rifle again.

This one was harder to be sure of. Had his revolver been in his hands instead of in Lestrade’s evidence bag, he’d have been better able to gauge it. But he still thought it unlikely. From here, John guessed, he’d probably be able to hit the window; but unless Clara had her nose pressed right up against it, it’d be hard to be sure of hitting her head.

Imagining shooting Clara in the head made him sick to his stomach. When the cold sweat broke out, he decided to end this phase of the investigation.

He dismounted the ladder and picked it up, swinging around to head back toward the garden shed. The end of the ladder struck against something soft that let out a muttered curse.

John dropped the ladder. The sound of it clattering onto the pavement made it impossible for him to figure out which direction the footsteps were heading; and by the time John had a fix on them, all he saw was a batlike silhouette merging with the darkness at the far end of the laneway.

* * *  
At long last, John saw someone hurrying down the white-tiled hallway who looked new enough not to have ever met either him or Sherlock, young enough to be easily intimidated, and tired enough that he might well forget about the whole encounter before tomorrow.

“Excuse me,” John said. “I was to meet Molly Hooper here, but I can’t seem to find her. Is she not in today?”

The young man blinked, put one hand up to scratch round his unkempt tow-colored hair, and said, “Oh. Hooper. Yes. She doesn’t work here any more.”

John had received his fair share of shocks to his system in the past few days, but somehow this one stunned him. How could Molly have left her job? He could not imagine Molly even existing outside the walls of Bart’s. 

“My goodness,” John said. “I hadn’t heard. Is she ill?”

The young man shook his head. “She was sacked.” A faint flicker of interest animated his glassy eyes for a moment. “Oh. Yes. I remember. It had to do with one of the bodies. Something about the way she handled it was irregular or something.”

An image of Molly handling Sherlock’s body in an irregular way did horrible things to John’s insides.

A door opened at the end of the hallway, and John made his escape before whoever came through it could recognize him and throw him out. He'd have to get access to Clara's body, and the body of whoever was left burned to a crisp in her frog pond, some other way. At the moment, he couldn't imagine how.

* * *

It was nearly midnight when John got back into his empty apartment. He pulled the rest of Harry’s lemon oregano chicken out of the fridge, stuck the pan in the oven, and threw himself into the living area’s only comfortable armchair. The rain finally began, hissing softly against the window panes.

He had been going, going, going all day and most of the night…and what did he have to show for it? He’d been blocked and thwarted at every turn. He didn’t know who the man was who’d taken his gun out of Harry’s car, though he could now be reasonably certain that he belonged to the official police. He knew that Harry had been framed for a murder that she hadn’t committed, but then he’d known that before they arrested her. He knew that Moriarty’s campaign to ruin Sherlock and erase him from public memory had at least a sympathizer and perhaps an accomplice in the upper echelons of the official police force. 

That was something. Though of course he knew that only because Lestrade had been willing to tell him.

And he knew, because he happened to be there when the call came, that instead of being killed and burned in Norwood, Clara had in fact been shot through an open windwo by a sniper in an empty house in Kensington. And he knew that there were a few places around the Palace Gardens Terrace house from which Clara could not possibly have been shot.

He could just about hear Sherlock’s voice in his head. _He’s nothing like Sherlock Holmes._

I’m not you, he thought. I watched you and I marveled at you and I tried to learn how to do what you do but I am not you and I can’t do it. You’d have seen something today that would have told you the whole story. And whatever it was, I probably looked right at it, and it told me nothing except for how much I wish you were here. And everything I look at tells me that.

His eye caught the oblong of cream-colored paper printed with the words “MARY WAS DRIVING.”

He flipped it over to look at the instructions on the back.

He was getting nowhere with the present. May as well take a look at the past.

John found the laptop, cleared a space on the table, turned it on, opened the browser, and typed in MARIANHARRY1512.

The screen faded away. Pixel by pixel, it reformed in a swirl of pastels—lavender, robin’s-egg blue, rose, mint, pinwheeling around a point in the center, filling the screen with color and light. Unexpectedly beautiful, if entirely cryptic. The pinwheel began to form itself into an oval, to acquire depth, to form, finally, an ellipsoidal striped ball hanging in the middle of what looked like a starry night sky.

What…

Oh. It was an easter egg.

John nearly laughed out loud. He positioned the arrow over the egg and clicked.

Bursts of spring color shot into the four corners of the screen, and in the space left by the image of the egg bloomed the letters, “VIRTUAL SHERLOCK EXPLAINS IT ALL.” Underneath was a menu of choices: HOW THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED. WHY YOUR FATHER LEFT. WHY YOU ARE NOT TO BLAME FOR YOUR MOTHER’S HEART ATTACK. NO THAT WAS NOT A REASONABLE USE OF FORCE AT THAT CLINIC IN KABUL BUT THAT IS NOT YOUR FAULT AND THIS IS WHY. OTHER (SPECIFY).

Christ almighty. He had told Sherlock about none of this. At least…he hadn’t noticed himself telling Sherlock about any of this.

There had been…had there maybe been one day, after that visit with Harry over Christmas, that he had made some remark about sobriety not having improved Harry’s driving at all, and Sherlock had looked at him and known it wasn’t a joke…and there was that time he’d seen some newspaper headline on the anniversary of the Haditha massacre and he’d said…what had he said?...something that wouldn’t have revealed a thing to anyone else. But evidently he had been telling Sherlock all about his secrets, all along, all the time he’d thought Sherlock wasn’t taking any more notice of him than he would of for instance a favorite collie dog of perhaps slightly above average intelligence.

John clicked on HOW THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED.

The egg expanded. He could see Sherlock, sitting in front of the webcam, distorted by its tiny and inadequate lens. The eyes, the cheekbones, the dark curling hair, the pallor, the intense and rather unsettling stare…just as if he were alive.

“Hello, John.”

Sherlock’s voice, even reduced to a tinny rattle from his computer’s cheap speakers, still made John’s eyes and throat sting.

“If you’re watching this then I’m dead and buried. I hope I’m buried. I did specifically ask not to be cremated, but frankly nobody has ever been capable of carrying out my instructions adequately, simple and clear as they always are.”

Sherlock’s head made one of its characteristic little moves, that _tch_ of annoyance with the stupidity of the world at large and John in particular. Then he settled himself, fixing his eyes on the camera.

“My inflated ego leads me to presume that my death may have caused you some pain. No doubt it was sudden and violent and it’s quite possible you witnessed it. I’m not there now and I wouldn’t be any use anyway in that type of situation, caring, you know, not a Holmes signature trait. But as your therapist is about as much use to you as a potted plant—less so, a potted plant consumes carbon dioxide and emits oxygen instead of the other way round—I put this together for you to have after I’m gone. It’s…it’s my gift. To you. Because.”

Sherlock looked down for a moment. John couldn’t see his expression. A hand reached up, and a jump in the image showed that Sherlock had turned the camera off and then restarted it.

“You never wanted me to know about these things. Not sure why. Since you concealed them I assume they were important. But now that I’m dead I don’t know them any more, so that’s all right; and I want you to have the answers. It’s the one bloody thing I’m good at, finding the answers. I’ve failed you on just about every other front.”

Another look away from the camera; another jump; and his face was back in frame, with that old irreverent glitter in the eyes.

“It’s an artificial intelligence application,” he said. “I designed it myself, at odd moments when the boredom got to be unbearable. It’s no more complex that that horrible thing that comes with the iPhone and probably just as annoying though of course it can’t be as annoying as I am. It’ll answer all your questions for you, as long as you don’t ask it anything I don’t already know.”

The clip ended. The image of Sherlock’s actual face dissolved into a 3-D animated version of it. Above its head were the words MARY’S DEATH. Below it was a button that read “INTRODUCTION.” And beneath that, a series of other ovals, each enclosing a legend: 

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?

SAY THAT AGAIN SLOWLY

BUT WHAT ABOUT…

WHY?

HOW?

THAT’S AMAZING

SHUT UP, SHERLOCK

It was highly irritating to discover that John’s end of most of their working conversations could be represented by an array of seven clickable buttons.

Well, he thought, let’s have the introduction.

The animated Sherlock began talking in its synthetic voice.

“I knew Harry had been in a crash the moment I walked into her office.”

John clicked “HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?”

The animated Sherlock hiccupped slightly and resumed. 

“When Harry stood up from her chair to greet me she pushed herself up with both arms. She’s not physically feeble but her abdominal muscles are weak. Why? She's never been pregnant, so unless she’s been bayonetted or in a knife fight it’s because those muscles were cut during surgery. Most elective abdominal surgery is done minimally invasively these days but she was cut open. Why? Because it was an emergency and the people operating weren’t sure where the trouble was. There’s a diagonal line of raised skin traveling from behind her left ear around her neck to the collarbone and some puckering of the skin on the left side of her face over the cheekbone. The diagonal line is a scar from the shoulder belt that stopped her going through the windscreen and the facial scarring is from broken glass from a car window. Both indicate she was sitting on the passenger side. Scars long healed, so this was years ago.”

John sat staring at the screen wearing the expression of exasperated wonder he had so often shown to the real Sherlock.

The animated voice resumed the main narrative. 

“Before our initial interview was over I knew what it was that estranged you.”

There wasn’t a button for “The drinking wasn’t enough?”, so John hit “HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?” again.

“Harry told me she would set things up with my estate the way she would do it for a same-sex couple. I said we weren’t lovers. She said ‘I know.’ I asked her how. It’s unusual for someone who reads your blog to be so positive on that point.”

“I just write it. I can’t help how people read,” John replied.

“Harry said, ‘The way you are together is perfect for him. You’re a genius, but you’re a mess. You need help, you need _his_ help, you need his devotion and care and love and loyalty and he’s got tons of it he’s been storing up for years. And he can give it all to you because even though you ask the earth from him and think nothing of it you’ll never ask for the one thing he _can’t_ give, the one thing a lover would certainly demand.’ And I said, ‘Which is what?’ and she said, ‘Intimacy.’”

“Christ!” John shouted at the screen. “Where the fuck does Harry get off--”

“And that was all, but that’s enough. Something happened long ago that made you shut down. You’re not naturally antisocial. I am, I know the difference. Someone broke your heart. Betrayal? Not likely; you enter relationships easily and you trust people too much and far too early. Tragedy, then. You lost someone you loved, probably a girlfriend, you do always date women though now I see that your inability to maintain a relationship for more than a fortnight is not entirely my fault. She’d have been young, so it’s disease, murder, or car crash. Car crash fits with Harry’s scars. Tragedy plus Harry plus drink plus car crash plus you have little to no contact with your only surviving family member equals she was drunk and driving the car in which your one true love was killed.”

It was amazing how much pain a simulated voice could inflict. The only thing keeping John from unplugging it and throwing the whole laptop right out the window was something that throbbed _inside_ the pain, something with crying lungs and a gaping mouth and a need to go on listening. To hear Sherlock, or something like Sherlock, do that thing he did one more time.

“Only Harry wasn’t driving. Her injuries are quite obviously in the wrong places. How could everyone miss that? You are a doctor, after all. Intriguing. Very intriguing. The details of the accident itself were easy enough to find. It happened out near Edinburgh where you and another young medical student named Mary Morstan had, alas, planned your destination wedding. She and Harry were in Harry’s car heading home from the hen party, where of course everyone was drinking heavily except for Mary, whose blood alcohol level was negligible. The car was struck on the driver’s side by a lorry barreling into a T-shaped intersection and catapulted off the road, rolling over once before coming to rest. The petrol tank was damaged and ignited; but before that happened Harry managed to unbuckle Mary and drag her out of the car.”

“That’s not what happened,” John began, and then remembered he was talking to a machine. He pressed the “BUT WHAT ABOUT…” button.

“The investigation concluded Mary had been thrown clear of the car because she didn’t buckle up. She was a medical student, she was sober, and she was going to be married in the morning. Of course she would have buckled up—especially if Harry was driving, because _Harry’s_ blood alcohol level was quite astonishing. Any investigation team capable of coming to _that_ conclusion is either composed entirely of idiots or not really trying because you’re not local and you won’t be back to bother them. Harry doesn’t remember what happened because she was drunk and sustained some minor head injuries and may well have been having the occasional blackout anyhow by that point. Abdominal surgery means internal bleeding which means she ruptured something, because the lap belt dug into her abdomen and then she strained herself getting Mary out of the car. Harry was trying to save Mary’s life, but nobody knows that. Harry assumes she was driving while intoxicated. You assume she was driving while intoxicated. The investigation team assumed she was driving while intoxicated and in fact the one thing I couldn’t answer is why she was never convicted of manslaughter.”

“Daddy fixed it for her,” John muttered. 

“Maybe your father fixed it for her. He was a judge, no doubt there were people who owed him. Nobody apparently bothered to wonder why the lorry driver’s mobile phone was found on the floor of the cab on the driver’s side, which is exactly where it would have fallen if it was jolted out of his hand while he was, for instance, texting something idiotic to some mouth-breathing mate of his instead of keeping his eyes on the road.”

The burning in John’s eyes and throat reached his brain. 

“You should have noticed Harry’s injuries were inconsistent with her being the driver. You were a medical student and you’re not stupid.”

“Oh. Thanks for that,” John snapped.

“You’re welcome. The only possible explanation is that emotion clouds your judgment to the point that you simply stop being a doctor. You stop being anything apart from upset and angry and sad. When you’re really in the grip of it you don’t think, you don’t observe, you don’t even really see what’s under your nose--”

John shot out of the chair, slashing his hands through the air at the image on the laptop.

“You son of a bitch!”

That felt good. 

“This is you. It’s you. There’s no intelligence, artificial or natural, that can do what you do. You—come out of there, Sherlock, come out of the fucking hard drive and face me like a man. I’m not CSI Baker Street, I can’t ping your IP address or whatever the hell it would take to find out where your signal’s coming in from. Sod the puzzles, sod the intelligence tests, sod whatever you’re trying to accomplish by being dead. You come here, you bastard, and you take what’s coming to you.”

He was trembling. He was hoarse. And he was screaming at a computer-generated image on his own laptop.

John’s knees buckled. He fell back into the chair.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Sherlock. I’m not angry. I know you’re dead. I’m…I’m sorry. This is just…I guess you wouldn’t have thought of this, but this virtual Sherlock toy is just a little upsetting. I mean I’m touched. It’s the nicest thing you’ve ever given me. It’s the only thing you’ve ever given me. I just…”

John closed his eyes, put his hands over them, and took a long, shuddering breath. He sat that way for a long time, breathing in, breathing out, trying not to see Mary in her coffin, or Harry at the funeral, terrifyingly sober, her face bruised and cut and one eye blackened.

“It’s no use,” he finally whispered into his self-imposed darkness. “You’re dead. You can’t hear me. And you’re never coming back.”

“Wrong on all counts, I’m afraid.”

John’s eyes sprang open. 

The window was open. There was a puddle of water soaking the cheap rug. Standing in that puddle, with water streaming off his black trenchcoat, with raindrops still trembling in the curls above his pale forehead, still glistening along the edges of his half-smiling lips, was Sherlock Holmes.

John leapt to his feet.

John’s heart hammered every single thing he had ever felt into one terrified throb. Blood beat in his ears, then drained away with the sound of falling sand. There was a sensation of falling, or maybe flying, and then darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear E.M. Forster: It is a shame you couldn't publish Maurice while you were alive; but I hope it gives you some pleasure to know that it is inspiring Sherlock slash 50 years after its publication. Love and windows, me.


	4. CHANGING THE NARRATIVE

When he came to, John was looking into Sherlock’s face and there was a hazy bright light behind it. John was nevertheless fairly certain that he was not dead. For one thing, he could feel cold rainwater dripping off Sherlock’s curls and onto his face. And for another, Sherlock was saying, “It’s all right. You’re not dead.”

John grabbed Sherlock around the back of the neck with both hands. 

“You’re….alive.” His own voice sounded like the last croak of a dying frog.

“Gently does it, John. You got a nasty knock on the table when you fell. I did try to catch you, but you’re surprisingly heavy for your size. I’ve been significantly underestimating your weight the whole time I’ve known you.”

John’s hands grabbed the short dark hair at the back of Sherlock’s neck and pulled it tight.

“Do not. Die. Ever again.”

“John, I know you’re in shock, but what you’re doing right now is extremely painful.”

John let go. His head fell back against a couch cushion which could not possibly have been in that spot when he fainted.

“Don’t move,” Sherlock said. “I’ll get you…a glass of water. Isn’t that what you do when people faint? Get them water? I read that somewhere but now I can't remember whether it was fiction or not.”

Sherlock couldn't remember something. The faint must have really rattled him.

“I’m fine,” John said. “Don’t…go anywhere.”

John struggled up into a sitting position. Sherlock crouched anxiously next to him, moving his hands as if to support him, then letting them fall.

“Sherlock,” John sighed. “I don’t…I don’t believe it. I mean…thank God. You’re back. I missed you.”

Sherlock dropped his eyes. Almost as if he were actually ashamed, for a moment, of something that he had done. 

“How on earth did you survive the fall?”

And intact, too. John let his eyes roam all over Sherlock, reassuring himself that Sherlock still had the same prominent features, the same narrow frame, the same long arms, the same tapered fingers. The same, all the same, except for something in the eyes. The black trenchcoat was threadbare, stained, and too short; and he wore a pair of battered work boots with broken laces. His hair hadn’t been cut in weeks. Well, it did go on growing for a while after death.

“You’re not dead,” he reminded himself, out loud.

“No. Nor am I a zombie or a vampire. I was never dead. In fact—“

Sherlock cut himself off. A vertical line of worry appeared between his dark eyebrows.

“Really, John, you don’t look at all well. You should go straight to bed. Let me help you—“

“No!”

John crawled around, grabbed the arm of the chair, and hauled himself up into it. Sherlock hovered over him, then looked around hesitantly and finally perched on the table, kicking off the boots. He was wearing brightly-colored argyle socks.

“Tell me what happened,” John said. “I need to know what happened. How you did it. _Why_ you did it. Why the fuck you fucking did this to—“

“All right, John, I heard you the first time.”

“And I would also like to know whose closet you have been raiding during your absence.”

“Yes, fine, all things in order, shall we? It’s a long story and rather hard to follow, especially after a knock to the head. Even under ordinary circumstances—“

John was waiting for the insult to his intelligence; but it didn’t come.

“So,” Sherlock said. “First things first. You discovered yourself that the phone call about Mrs. Hudson was a hoax.”

“And you knew it from the start.”

“I’d sent Moriarty a text telling him to meet me on the roof of St. Bart’s. I thought I had the key code.”

That strange new thing happened to Sherlock’s face. Eyelids dropped, corners of the mouth turned slightly down, brows slightly closer together.

“You _thought_ you had it.”

Sherlock took a deep breath, exhaling it between clenched teeth.

“You were wrong.”

There was a tense pause.

“Yes. Yes, John, yes, I was wrong. Moriarty outsmarted me. There. I said it.”

“Oh my God,” John murmured.

Sherlock started telling him what had happened on the roof. And John followed it; but he could not put out of his mind the image of Sherlock’s face discovering, probably for the first time since infancy, that he had been entirely wrong about something very important. Talk about changing the narrative. Sherlock having to live in a world where it was possible for him to be _really_ wrong, _permanently_ wrong…he must have been shattered inside, long before the fall.

“The key was a hoax,” Sherlock was saying. “It was all a trick. The assassins weren’t after the key. They were there to make me _think_ the key existed—and to hold you hostage.”

“What…I don’t…”

“Moriarty told me that three assassins had been assigned to shoot you, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson at a certain point if they didn’t see me take a flying leap off the roof of St. Bartholomew’s. There was some kind of code word, some command he could have given them to call them off…and I thought I could get it out of him…but instead…”

Sherlock’s hands, dangling over his knees, shook just a little.

“Well. I talked to him, and then he killed himself.”

“Oh no. How?”

“Put his gun in his mouth and blew the back of his head out.”

“Oh my God.”

“I know—I mean—Moriarty’s brain, the brain that a second ago had been capable of outthinking me, spattered all over the roof. I…and that was the end of the way out, I’d have to jump or all of you would die. I would have done it. I was going to do it. And then I remembered Molly.”

“Molly,” John muttered.

“You know something,” Sherlock said, losing for an instant that look of confused pain. “Something’s happened to her. I hear it in your voice. What about Molly? Is she—don’t tell me she’s dead. Please don’t tell me that.”

“I don’t know if she’s dead or not,” John said, startled by Holmes’s alarm. “All I know is she’s been sacked.”

“Oh.” Sherlock slumped into relief. “Oh. Yes. I knew that. My fault, I’m afraid.”

“I was just coming around to that conclusion,” John said. “Are those her socks?”

“Yes. They are Molly’s socks. Mine were all over blood.”

“Oh.”

“You remember, after that hideous scene at Kitty Riley’s house, I ran off on my own?”

“Of course I remember.”

“I went to Molly. I asked her to help me with something—something I didn’t want you to know about.”

John felt the anger rising in him again. 

“I knew that Moriarty had to kill me,” Sherlock went on. “If I remained alive, even in disgrace, I’d find a way to bring him down. He wouldn’t stop until I was dead or he was. So I would have to kill him…or I would have to die. And she was going to help me die.”

“You mean…pretend to die.”

“Exactly. She has access to the morgue, she was the logical person to recruit as an accomplice, and—“

“And you weren’t going to tell me about this.”

“Well, you’d have stopped it, wouldn’t you?”

“Bloody right I would have!”

“And you would have done what instead?”

John’s heart froze.

“I would have killed Moriarty myself.”

“Yes. That’s how you would have solved the final problem. Extrajudicial murder.”

“Self-defense—“

“In your eyes, in the heat of the moment, but not in anyone else’s eyes; and in the long run, not even in your own. I didn’t want that on your record _or_ on your conscience, John, not knowing how you felt after…”

John murmured, almost inaudibly, “After the clinic in Kabul.”

Sherlock nodded. When he finally went on, his voice was roughened, as if he had suddenly caught cold.

“I hadn’t quite thought through my end of the plan. But you know Molly. She went right to work as soon as I spoke to her. I asked her to make a kind of…well…a kind of mask. Of me. Latex, trademark curly locks attached, custom-molded, the kind they use in films, the kind good enough to fool a camera in a closeup. And when I’d decided the time was right, she’d put this mask on the body of some unclaimed male corpse and as long as she was the only one who handled the body, it would pass for mine. It would be buried with full pomp and honors, and then I would be free to roam through London, tracking Moriarty, waiting for him to get careless and make the mistake that would be his undoing.”

“Sounds wonderful,” John said, tonelessly. “And I would be doing what all this time?”

“Listen, John…”

“Don’t you ‘Listen, John’ me. Don’t give me that look either.”

“What look?”

“That, ‘I’m sure you understand why for the sake of the case I had to dose you with poisoned sugar and set an imaginary gigantic hound on you’ look. You wanted _me_ to believe you were dead so I’d convince everyone else, is that it? Since I’m the one who tells your story.”

“The sugar wasn’t really—“

“Shut up, Sherlock.”

“For the plan to work at all, people had to believe that I--”

“I could have lied for you.”

“You’d have tried, John, but you’re not good at it.”

That was true enough. But it didn’t help with the mess of anger and pain that was churning in John’s chest.

“So,” John bit off, trying to keep it all down. “How’d you do it?”

Sherlock looked down at his socks, and took a mournful breath.

“I texted Molly to come up to the roof and bring an IV stand, a pair of knee braces, and Fauxlocks.”

“Fauxlocks.” John said. “The Sherlock mask.”

“Exactly. Poor woman, it’s as well that she’s used to handling suicides. Moriarty’s head was a mess. But she got the mask on him. We put the knee braces on him under the trousers so we could lock his legs into a standing position. I put my overcoat and scarf and shoes on him and shoved the IV stand up the back of the coat. We managed to get him standing up straight at the edge of the roof. We scored the overcoat with the scalpel, going down the back where the IV stand was. We were going to just tip him over. And then I saw you get out of the cab.”

Sherlock bent his head over his knees, working his fingers through his hair, pulling at it, making strange subverbal sounds.

“Sherlock?”

When Sherlock finally looked up, his eyes were burning, and the rims were very red.

“I couldn’t let you come up. The assassin targeting you would have shot you before you got into the building and out of his sight line. So I had to…I squatted down on a different part of the roof and called you. Molly…she’s smarter than I ever gave her credit for being, John, she knew exactly what to do. She stuck the mobile into Moriarty’s clenched fingers—and she got behind him and held his hand up to his ear.”

“So all that time I thought I was looking at you…”

“You were looking at the late Moriarty, being worked by Molly like a puppet.”

John’s brain lurched into motion. Things began connecting. He could almost hear the snaps as they fell into place.

“That’s why you kept telling me to keep my eyes fixed on you. And not to move from that spot.”

“Well of course. If you moved, the angle would change and you’d see Molly up there. And if you’d stopped looking at…what you thought was me…you’d probably have seen me hunched in the far corner, looking down at you.”

“So when you were finished with your ‘note’...”

“Molly let the arms drop. She tipped him over. The coat tore on either side of the IV stand, and he dropped over the side. Free fall. You and the others kept your eyes on the body; you’d never have noticed Molly, flat on her stomach, pulling the IV stand back onto the roof.”

John realized that, in his eagerness to get the solution, he had almost forgotten how angry he was.

“She didn’t get down there fast enough to be the first to the body. But after the paramedics pronounced ‘me’ dead—God knows it was quick, Moriarty was dead enough at that point for three people—she took over. Of course she couldn’t let anyone autopsy Moriarty’s body, so she…forged a few things and bribed a few people to get it into and out of the funeral home without one. That’s what got her sacked.”

“And so…that’s who’s buried in your grave. Moriarty.”

“I thought it was a nice touch.”

John nodded. “Yes. Except for the part where I told him all the things I always wanted to tell you and never did, and then cried over him.”

Sherlock was silent. There was another new expression on his face that John couldn't place. Sherlock had added some new feeling to his limited repertoire. John tried to guess which one it was; but his anger came back before he could place it.

“None of this explains why you lied to me.”

Sherlock’s new expression bled into a look of panic and despair.

“You’re a doctor. The sight of blood and trauma doesn’t bother you like it does most people. If you got at all close to that body you’d realize it wasn’t mine. Unless…unless you were so upset that you stopped being a doctor.”

John drew breath, hesitating for a moment because none of the invective he typically had at his disposal was anywhere near scorching enough.

“I knew that confessing that I was a fraud would upset you more than my actual death. I told you that lie because I knew it would hurt you. I knew—I knew from how it worked out with Mary’s accident—that you’d be so…so…destroyed…that by the time you got to my body, you wouldn’t be able to see straight. And you didn’t.”

John’s whole body was on fire now.

“I cannot—fucking—believe—you would do that to—“

“You don’t understand, John!” Sherlock shouted. “I’d been cornered. I’d been duped. I lost control of the situation. A dozen things happened that I failed to predict. I was scrambling. I _could not control the timing!_ ”

“ _What?_ ”

“I didn’t _want_ you there to see it, that’s why I let you chase down that ridiculous phone call. You got there too fast and you worked it out too early and you came back and…you were too smart, for once, and so the plan had to change. Do you think I _wanted_ that to be your final memory of me? I wasn’t planning any more, John, I had to improvise as I went along. I did the best I could. I did the best I could to stop a bullet from going into _your head_ , and I wasn’t sure it would work. I was never for one moment fully confident that you wouldn’t be shot dead right there in front of me. Do you think you were the _only_ person hurt that day? Or in the weeks afterward? Do you _really_?”

Anger, pain, and something else, that new thing John was trying to place, all riding toward him on the heat of Sherlock’s breath, all trembling in Sherlock’s eyes and mouth and hands.

“You miserable fucker,” John said. But he said it, to his own surprise, gently. And he put a hand on Sherlock’s knee. And Sherlock left it there.

“Ah well,” John finally resumed. “I could use that month of my life back, and some of the brain cells I killed drinking myself to sleep, and I suppose the sleeping tablets will have made my inadequate brain foggier than ever, but otherwise, no harm done, right? And it was a brilliant plan.”

“Crap.”

Sherlock jumped off the edge of the table, turned toward the window, then veered abruptly away from it.

“I beg your pardon?” John replied. 

“That plan was crap, John, it was shite, it was without question the worst scheme I ever concocted, and I’m including my attempt to turn _radix pedis diabolis_ into a recreational drug.”

“I don’t know,” John said meekly, as Sherlock strode about the room as if he were looking for things to beat his head against. “It all seems very clever to me.”

“One requires of a plan that it should _work,_ ” Sherlock cried. “Yes, it accomplished the short-term goal of keeping you three alive, and from that point of view it could be called successful. But only at the zenith of my hubristic self-delusion could I have thought that in the long term nobody would discover the ruse. Molly’s forgeries were detected. She’s been told she’s facing criminal charges. There must have been an investigation. Someone must have found out.”

“Nobody’s said anything,” John observed.

“I know. Whoever discovered the deception let it stand, for reasons of their own.”

“But then how do you know anyone discovered it?”

“Because someone is still trying to kill me.”

Sherlock swallowed something in his throat that seemed to be hurting him, and tried to control his hands. 

“I’ve been lying low, working the homeless network, but by God if Moriarty didn’t have a homeless network too, and someone-- _someone_ \--is taking shots at me. I’ve survived four attempts already. They’ll hit me one of these days, and then all they have to do is dump my body or burn it and nobody will investigate the death of Sherlock Holmes because he is, what, already dead. Brilliant, Sherlock. Well done. You’ve fooled absolutely everyone in the whole world _except for the people you were trying to fool_. My cunning plan accomplished _nothing_ apart from cutting me off from all help and comfort and breaking the heart of the only person in the world that I ever loved.”

Sherlock turned away from him, tucking his body into a corner and peering sidelong out the window. In profile his brow and nose were as proud and clear-cut as ever, but his chest was heaving and his jaw was clenched so hard the muscles were starting to tremble.

John rose out of the chair, slowly, and began stealing toward the patch of carpet on which Sherlock’s argyle socks had come to rest.

“Sherlock.”

“I have to go now, John.”

“No.”

“If I don’t slip out before dawn they’ll know I’ve been here. It would be dangerous for you.”

“I don’t care.”

“John, please—“

“No.”

“You know I meant love only in the…only in the sense of…”

John grabbed Sherlock by the shoulder and turned him around. Sherlock staggered back against the yellowed wallpaper. The look of terror on Sherlock’s poor face almost made John think better of it. But at moments, the terror faded, and that new expression came back. That new feeling written on Sherlock’s working face, the cipher John thought he might have just cracked.

“You missed me too,” John said.

“Yes—“

“You missed seeing me. You missed hearing my voice.”

“Yes…”

“You thought about us holding hands in a dark alley, handcuffed together, running for your life from Lestrade and friends.”

“I know you don’t want any part of it, John, I shouldn’t have said—“

“You have _no idea_ what I want!”

Sherlock’s eyes opened wider. Or maybe that was just the pupils dilating.

John put one hand around the back of Sherlock’s head and tried to draw it forward. It wouldn’t budge. Sherlock's neck was stiff as a tree trunk and the tendons in his neck felt like suspension cabled. But Sherlock’s pupils _were_ dilating. 

John grabbed Sherlock’s wrist with his other hand, pushing it against the wall and holding it there, just above Sherlock’s head. 

Pulse also elevated. And if Sherlock’s breathing got any more rapid he would begin hyperventilating.

“Dangerous for me,” John said. “Too late for that one. I’m done with safety. Listen. The only thing you never asked for, the only thing I thought I couldn’t give you. I want you to have it. Do you want it?”

Sherlock nodded. His breathing accelerated, and the muscles in his neck got even tighter.

“Then what’s the matter?”

Sherlock whispered, “I have no idea how this works.”

So many things revealed in that one frightened sentence.

John nodded briskly in what he hoped was an encouraging way. 

“Right,” John said. “Well. First thing is, don’t talk.”

Sherlock nodded. 

“I mean unless I’m doing something you don’t like or that hurts—“

“Yes, yes, you’re a perfect gentleman,” Sherlock retorted. “Then what?”

“It might help if you close your eyes.”

Sherlock did. It made the look of terrified anticipation that much more heartbreaking.

“Now," John said, softly. "You wait for my touch and you follow my lead.”

Sherlock steeled himself. “All right.”

John stroked Sherlock’s cheek with one hand, gently. He leaned in toward Sherlock’s flushed face and panting mouth.

“This is not difficult,” John whispered, his lips barely touching Sherlock’s. “It's something anyone can do. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes.”

Sherlock’s hands flew, apparently of their own accord, around John’s shoulders. Sherlock’s neck craned forward, and their lips met, and Sherlock opened John’s mouth. 

And from then on, it was just the way everything was with Sherlock. Startling, and awkward, and manic, and amazing. 

John began to wonder if Sherlock had ever been touched anywhere. The slightest things seemed to send seismic waves through his whole body. But get past the skin and they were both at sea, both drowning in some unknown element, clinging to each other and doing their best to fight their way to shore. With his eyes closed, with his arms wrapped too tight around Sherlock’s chest, John saw an image of his own heart as a battered tin box, the lid jumping and banging as things locked inside it fought for escape. And at some point, maybe just at the time that the first rays of sunshine came in through that window, John felt the box crack open, the lid tear off, and sheet after sheet of paper flutter into the air, a fleet of white butterflies printed with the words of all his unwritten stories.

They lay there, on that ugly carpet, the sun shining on both of them. Sherlock was looking up into John’s face. Yes, that was it, the new expression. Desire. Attraction. Love.

“You were right,” Sherlock said, as his breath slowed. “It’s not difficult. Not with you.”

“No,” John said. “But I’m not worried. I’m sure that when your clothes are on, you’ll be as difficult as ever.”

Sherlock shot him a look. But he was almost smiling.

“We could have done this without your dying, you know,” John said.

"No I don't know,” Sherlock retorted. “You're always telling everyone you’re not gay.”

“I’m not gay,” John replied. “Not straight either.”

Sherlock laughed.

“You’re the one who told me you were married to your work,” John said.

Sherlock’s eyes recovered a little of their old glitter.

“I am. Now you’re married to my work too. So I suppose what we have here is some type of threesome.”

They both burst out laughing. John’s arms buckled and he collapsed onto Sherlock’s bare chest. John put his ear to Sherlock’s heart. There it was. Beating and everything. Not burned out after all.

Sherlock sniffed the air.

“I didn’t like to say earlier,” Sherlock said. “But there is a distinct smell in here of…carbonizing organic matter. Possibly poultry. There might once have been oregano in it.”

Before John could answer, a key turned in the lock on the front door.

“Oh no,” John muttered.

The door clattered back on its hinges. 

“John? Hello? Something’s burn—AAAGH!”

Harry’s bag dropped from her shoulder, striking the ground with a clank. Her eyes widened to the size of soup plates and her mouth hung open in dismay.

John said the first thing that came into his head.

“It’s all right, Harry, he’s not actually dead.”

“Oh my God. _Sherlock?_ ”

“Good morning, Harry,” Sherlock said, tilting his head back to look at her upside-down. “John was just—“

“No,” Harry said, holding up both hands in front of her face. “No—it’s fine—no need—don’t mind—look, I’ll come in again.”

She disappeared. The door closed. 

“Sherlock,” John whispered. “Find your clothes. Quick.”

As the smell of burning grew stronger, John struggled back into his shirt and trousers. Sherlock, unable to locate anything but the socks, wrapped himself up in his trenchcoat and belted it tightly. He sat down in the armchair, studiously unconcerned. John was glad to have his own nakedness well covered, but there was nothing he could do about the deep shade of red he had just turned.

“It’s all right, Harry,” John called.

Harry knocked on the door. John walked over and opened it.

“Morning, John.”

“Morning, Harry.” 

Harry walked in. 

“Uh…sorry about the…”

“Let us never speak of it again,” Harry said. She walked straight into the kitchen, turned off the oven, and opened the door. A cloud of black smoke belched forth from it.

She found a pair of oven mitts and removed the casserole pan, looking at it a little wistfully. She ran some cold water over it, and then tossed the whole pan into the garbage.

“All right,” she said, removing the oven mitts and dusting off her hands. “Would either of you like to tell me what the hell is going on?”

Sherlock and John looked at each other.

“I mean apart from the upgrade.”

“The what?” Sherlock demanded.

“It’s—never mind, Sherlock,” John said. “Do you want to tell her or should I?”

“Maybe you’d better do it,” Sherlock said. “We don’t want a repeat of what happened when I told the story. Well, not _immediately._ ”

“And this way,” John said, when he was done coughing, “I can fill you in on my investigation of Clara’s murders.”

“Murders?”

Harry and Sherlock’s voices rang out together, with exactly the same emphasis on the terminal ‘s.’

John scratched his head. “Yes. Maybe Lestrade wouldn’t have told you.”

“That weasel wouldn’t tell me anything,” Harry snapped. 

“That body burnt in the frog pond, that wasn’t Clara. Nobody knows who it was. Clara was found dead last evening in her Palace Gardens property. Shot in the head. While you were in custody. That’s why you’re out.”

“Oh my God,” Harry said. 

She found one of the folding chairs and dropped into it.

“What a world to come back to,” Sherlock piped up, clapping his hands together and rubbing them. “One victim, two murders, neither of them solved. And there's a frog pond too. Once you come back from the dead, apparently, it’s Christmas every day.”

Harry shot him a look. Since he had not grown up with Harry, Sherlock failed to appreciate its significance. 

“Well chop chop, John, let’s have the details,” Sherlock chirruped.

Harry rose to her full height. She was only five and a half feet tall, but from close up, the glare was effective, even on Sherlock. 

“Clara was not good to me,” she said. “She lied to me, she cheated on me, she treated me like a toy. I had to leave her to save myself. All that’s true. But I loved that woman for nine years and I shared her home for five and no matter how many bitter memories she made for me, it makes me sick to think of her ending her life scared and alone in that empty half-renovated house, running from whatever it was that she thought I was going to save her from. I’m glad you’re back. I’m happy for John. I truly am. But this is not Christmas. Not for me. And it’s not Easter either.”

“It’s a shame you won’t have the opportunity to take the stand in your own defense,” Sherlock said. “Do you practice these speeches alone in your office, or are they improvised extempore?”

“Sherlock!” John shouted.

“It’s all right.” Harry favored Sherlock with one last look. “It’s your first day. I shouldn’t begrudge. And you are going to find the person who shot her, after all.”

“Of course ,” Sherlock replied. "A murder without a solution is like Christmas without presents."

“So,” John said, before Harry could reply. “Should I…”

Harry sighed. “Sit. Talk. I’ll put the kettle on.”

John sat down across the table. There was Sherlock, carrying off that ridiculous trenchcoat as if it were a Balenciaga gown. And Harry was there, and she hadn’t killed Mary at all. And she was happy for him. And she almost didn’t hate Sherlock. Take the two murders, the assassins still combing the streets for Sherlock, the shadowy figures working against him somewhere in the corner offices of New Scotland Yard. All in all, it was still the best morning he’d seen in a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be real interested to see how the show explains Sherlock's fall, and whether what they come up with is going to be more or less farfetched than this story.
> 
> What Sherlock says about how crappy is plan was restates some of the objections Doyle's early fans had to "Adventure of the Empty House." Doyle, of course, was trying to kill Holmes for real in "Final Problem," so he didn't leave himself much wiggle room, and "Empty House" has to stretch pretty hard to explain the whole escapade. Moffat et al. obviously knew they were bringing Sherlock back, so presumably they built a plausible explanation into "Reichenbach Fall;" but they have painted themselves into an even tighter corner by having John actually witness the fall, see the impact, and touch the body (in "Final Problem" the bodies are supposed to have disappeared into the whirlpool). Ah well. Patience.  
> *****  
> Editing November 14, 2013
> 
> Now that I'm on tumblr I get to profit from the wisdom of the hive mind, including [this explanation](http://the-strangest-love.tumblr.com/post/16219942303/patrick-jane-conveniently-explains-sherlock) of a simple trick Sherlock could have done with materials at hand to fake not having a pulse. It would depend on John being too out of it to try the carotid artery, but maybe that's why he arranged to have John run over with a bike on his way to the body (I'm assuming that was arranged).
> 
> Also, when I came up with this solution I thought that John had witnessed the impact. That's because that sequence is edited to imply that. In fact, *we* see the impact, but not from John's perspective. John doesn't see the impact because Sherlock's making John stand at a point where a small brick building blocks his view of the sidewalk. So that makes it much more likely that it was really Sherlock who fell, he just landed on something soft and then got into his "dead" makeup before John reached him.
> 
> Ah well. We'll find out in January.


	5. MORIARTY, LTD.

While John explained, Harry closed and locked the windows, drew the blinds, shot all the bolts on the door, made tea, found a few pieces of bread for the toaster, cleared the table, and laid three places. By the time John finally subsided into silence, they were all facing each other over the remains of a nearly decent breakfast.

Sherlock broke the silence.

“You say there was someone in the laneway with you, into whom you blundered with your purloined stepladder.”

John’s reverie ended abruptly. “I thought that was you.”

“Why me?” Sherlock asked.

“I…I don’t know, it reminded me of you somehow. Of course everything reminds me of you. I mean used to. I mean—hm. All right. Never mind. I suppose I assumed…since you did turn up later that night…I thought you’d seen me, and…and decided to…”

“No,” Sherlock said, a little more gently than usual. “I wasn’t there. I came back because…look, I’ll explain later.”

“Sometime when I’m out, no doubt,” Harry said, reaching into her bag. “Here’s your mobile back, John. Unfortunately they still have your revolver.”

She passed it to him across the table. Her eyes rested sadly on the inscription. John passed Harry’s phone back to her in silence. Before she could pick it up, Sherlock’s hand shot out and grabbed it.

“Give it back,” Harry said. 

Sherlock’s hands danced over it as he ignored her.

“Sherlock,” John said.

“Fine.” Sherlock shoved the phone back across the table. “I’m finished.”

“So,” John said, before Harry could get started. “Where do we start? Do we go back to Norwood?”

Sherlock snorted. “Norwood? No. We know what happened at Norwood. It’s the second murder that will give us the answers.”

“ _We_ do not know what happened at Norwood,” John said, slowly. “ _You_ may know what happened at Norwood, but you still need to tell _us_.”

“All right, John.” Sherlock swung around to Harry. “When you saw Clara, that last night, was she wearing that yellow diamond ring?”

“Yes,” Harry said.

“Are you sure?”

“First thing I said to her after I walked into the house. ‘Still wearing the Moonstone, I see.’”

“Excellent.”

“You may think it’s excellent—“ Harry began.

“It establishes the time frame. The ring was fused to the corpse’s finger. It must have been placed there before the body was burned. Clara couldn’t have removed that ring without your noticing. Not until after you fell asleep at about one o’clock in the morning.”

“How in hell do you know when I fell asleep?”

Sherlock tossed Harry’s mobile back to her.

“Activity on your mobile ceases soon after 5:00pm, which is when you arrived. Between eight and nine-thirty you used your browser a number of times to access various legal databases and several estate agent websites. After that your phone goes dark until 12:46am, when you checked your texts and your email. So the first period of inactivity corresponds with dinner, then a burst of activity while you and Clara went through her affairs, and then Clara maneuvered business into pleasure and that accounts for the second period of inactivity. You hadn’t planned on staying the night and John doesn’t know where you are and you’re still worried about him. It’s too late to call, and poor form anyway after a tender encounter; but you had a furtive peek at your phone to see if there were any worrisome messages. Probably while Clara was brushing her teeth.”

Harry’s lips compressed. Then she said, “Don’t ever try to cheat on him, John.”

Sherlock chose to ignore this. “Between one in the morning and say four o’clock in the morning because you sent your first text at 4:23 and you must have spent some time searching the house first. You concluded that Clara had left the house. Why?”

“She’d left her mobile on the bedside table and it wasn’t there.”

“Was anything else of hers missing?”

“Not that I could see.”

“When you went over her assets, did you notice anything odd?”

John looked at Harry. Her eyes had a kind of faraway look. He wondered if perhaps she had a mind palace that she was visiting. He glanced at Sherlock. Sherlock cocked his head in Harry’s direction, and motioned to John for silence. 

“There was money coming in that I couldn’t account for,” Harry finally said. “Clara hadn’t sold a property since 2008. The interest payments from her trust are transferred to her checking account automatically but she’d been making individual deposits, different amounts at different times. I asked her about them and she said they were rent checks from tenants. But the amounts weren’t consistent from month to month. Anyway I don’t think she owned anything that was in move-in condition.”

“So she was in better shape than you thought,” John said.

“No. Worse. She had me looking through everything because she was hoping I could find some liquidity—something she could turn into cash--”

“I speak the language, Harry,” Sherlock retorted.

“Fine. Well there wasn’t any. Everything that had come in had already gone out. The payments fluctuated, so there were months when she was high and months when she was low. Clara’s not good at...sorry. Clara _wasn’t_ good at managing her income. She owns eleven posh houses in desirable locations, but she bought right at the peak of the housing bubble, and now every last one of them is worth less than what she owes on the mortgage, so she couldn’t sell even if she could find a buyer. Trust me. We tried to sell that Norwood house when we broke up. It couldn’t be done. I let her buy me out for a peppercorn just to get the hell away from her.”

“A peppercorn,” John said.

“For a transaction of that kind to be legally meaningful a consideration must be exchanged,” Sherlock said. “In cases where the consideration is materially negligible, it is referred to, in that quaint legal argot to which Harry is addicted, as a peppercorn. So the trust income,” he went on. “This would have been a trust set up for her when she reached majority, with controls on how frequently she could access it and how much she could draw.”

“Absolutely. As a parent, her father is more or less a failure; but he does know enough to keep Clara’s hands off the principal.”

“Her father is Ronald Adair.”

“Yes.”

“Chief financial officer of British International Banking & Investing.”

“Or BIBI, as we used to call it,” Harry answered.

“Wait,” John said. “Wait. I’ve heard of them.”

“Good man, John,” Sherlock snarked.

“It was one of your cases. Before…the…before. You rescued one of their top executives from kidnappers. He gave you a tie pin.”

“I knew it would come to you.”

“It’s a small world,” John said.

“It’s a big bank,” Harry replied.

“And her mother was…”

“Eleanor Blackheath. They divorced when Clara was small. Eleanor has her own consulting business now. But she cut Clara off financially after she left university. They were never close.”

Sherlock put his fingertips together and looked out over them. John felt a twinge of irritation.

“Did Clara give you the most recent statements about the trust?” he finally asked.

“No. She said she couldn’t find them.” 

Sherlock’s lips parted in a satisfied half-smile.

“Oh good Lord,” Harry snapped, striking the table in her annoyance. “She was raiding the trust. She was forging the trustee signatures and taking out the principal. That’s where the monthly payments came from. Why didn’t I see that?”

Sherlock leaned forward. John watched the two of them lock eyes, sharing the same buzz. He had the odd feeling that he could just as well have been watching himself, in those early days, getting pulled into Sherlock’s orbit.

“Because you’re only half right,” Sherlock said. “If Clara were raiding the trust for monthly expenses, she would have seen to it that the income kept pace with the outflow. The payments _you_ saw didn’t match her needs. They were tied to some unpredictable force beyond Clara’s control. They must derive from some other source. Probably illegitimate, if not illegal. But the fact that she ‘lost’ the trust statements strongly suggests that she _was_ raiding it. She was putting the money into a secret account belonging to a fabricated identity which Clara planned to assume after her ‘death.’”

Harry nodded, thinking it through.

“She evades all her creditors,” Harry said, slowly. “She’s shut of all those mortgages. If the abuse of the trust ever comes to light, it will be traced back to a dead woman who siphoned out the cash and then spent it all and that’s the end. Clara hides out for a while in one of her vacant properties to wait for the case to be closed, and then starts over with a new name and a clean credit history. She’s back in the game.” Harry closed her eyes and rubbed them wearily. “Meanwhile I’m serving a life sentence in prison. She gets the omelet and I’m the broken egg.”

While Harry subsided into gloom, John said, “I don’t know why I bothered going down to Norwood. Clearly it wasn’t necessary.” 

“Don’t despair, John,” Sherlock said, airily. “It wasn’t all wasted effort. You did after all nearly throttle Lestrade. But even he should have known all this the instant he looked at that empty frog pond.”

“How?” John prompted, after he realized Harry wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

“It had been drained ahead of time. John’s narration of his Norwood caper does not indicate any evidence of work being done there. It was drained only because it is the only place on the grounds where one could incinerate a human body and be fairly sure the fire wouldn’t spread. Though the victim was supposedly shot, there were no bloodstains in the house. How could anyone look at this and _not_ know that this murder was planned in such a way as to minimize damage to the Norwood property? And who would have cared about _that_ but the woman who owned it?”

“So,” John said. “Clara decoys Harry down there on a pretext. For the plan to work, Harry has to stay the night. There’s only one way to make that happen.”

Harry put her head down on the table and covered it with her arms, letting out a humiliated groan. 

“As part of this plan, Clara or someone else decoys some other person into the frog pond, shoots her, and burns her.”

“Without access to the bodies we can’t be sure of that,” Sherlock said. “For all we know they took an existing corpse and made it serve their purposes. But yes, someone has to have produced a human body, between one and four a.m., put it in that frog pond, and incinerated it. Then Clara and her confederate, separately or together, left the scene for their respective hiding places, leaving Harry to face her very awkward morning after.”

Harry sat up, glaring.

“So it all goes according to plan…up to a point,” John said.

Sherlock’s eyes sparked. “Exactly. After Harry’s arrest something went wrong. And we need to find out what it was.”

“Why?” John asked.

“What?” Harry and Sherlock chorused.

“Why? Harry’s no longer a suspect, I don’t particularly care about getting justice for a woman who has done her best to destroy my sister’s life, and I don’t see that Sherlock has anything at stake here at all.”

Sherlock let out an exasperated shout and lunged across the table. John knew he was in for it.

“Think about it, John. You’re Clara Adair. You’re involved in some kind of illegal activity which you thought would pay your bills but doesn’t. You decide to disappear. You set up and fund your new identity, but for the death to stick you need to leave a body behind. Your crimes so far have been strictly of the bloodless variety. You yourself have no idea how one provides oneself with a burnable corpse. But you know some people who might know some people. So you go to these people and you let them know you have a rather messy problem to solve.”

John emitted a groan of exhaustion and agony.

“Ah, the sound of the penny dropping,” Sherlock said happily. “How I have missed it.”

“Dear Jim,” John said, as the memory of the bomb tightened his chest. “Dear Jim, will you fix it for me…”

“Moriarty,” Sherlock breathed. “The one and only consulting criminal.”

“But Moriarty’s dead,” Harry objected. “He’s been dead for a month. He shot himself in the head and then that poor lovesick woman pushed him off the roof of a building. Is _he_ coming back too? Is everyone you know immortal, John?”

“Moriarty the man is dead,” Sherlock said, sliding back into his chair. “Long live Moriarty, Limited.”

“Someone’s taken over his practice,” John said.

Sherlock nodded. “Moriarty had no direct contact with his clients. That’s what kept him safe. Most of the people who brought in the business reported to subordinates who reported to superiors and so on. For the honest people of London, Moriarty is now a myth. But his clients and his operatives and associates know perfectly well that Moriarty was real. The only people who know he’s dead are the people on that rooftop, the people in this room, and the people who investigated Molly’s handling of the body. His closest associates—the ones who were in direct contact with him—must realize what’s happened. But as far as the rest of them know, Moriarty’s still alive; the trial and my own downfall were just his way of returning to the shadows after a profitable but dangerous period of notoriety.”

“And if it were generally known that Moriarty was dead…” Harry said.

“It would irreparably damage a well-organized and highly profitable enterprise. So why reveal it? Moriarty the man was mortal. Moriarty the _brand_ can live forever.”

Sherlock’s eyes were bright, his lips parted, his hands floating a little above the table, fingers spread as if about to flutter. He was fascinated by the dark beauty of his own idea. John, himself, felt an urge to vomit. 

“And this is why they have to kill you,” John said. “To bring you back we have to tell the whole story. If you come back to life, then Moriarty dies.”

“But…” Harry interjected. “But…”

Sherlock was recalled to earth, and very irritated about it. “What?”

“But that Norwood thing is a mess,” Harry burst out. “It was so overdone. Moriarty is supposed to be smart, right? As smart as Sherlock? And they left that will out on the table, and they planted that revolver in the toilet tank, and then their client gets shot the next day. If this is a Moriarty, Ltd. job, it’s not very good for the brand.”

“You’re right, Harry,” Sherlock said, fire snapping in his eyes. “You’re absolutely right. But I think it more than likely that more than one person is at work here. We might hypothesize, for instance, that Moriarty, Ltd. would have concocted the scheme, told Clara what to do, left that will on the table to point toward motive, and disposed of poor Crunchy Frog Pond--”

Harry grimaced. “Please tell me you didn’t just give that corpse a nickname.”

“I like it,” John said. “Or we could go with ‘Crunchy Unboned Real Dead—‘”

“John, stop it!”

“Cease your bickering, children, or I will stop the car this instant,” Sherlock said. “All of that is consistent with the brand. But the planting of the revolver is, as Harry says, clumsy. Given the abundance of other evidence pointing to Harry, this need to plant an actual murder weapon suggests anxiety and insecurity and a general unwillingness to leave things to chance. These are not the hallmarks of an audacious criminal mastermind; they smack more of the bureaucrat. The functionary. The upper-level administrator. The—“

“The person Lestrade warned me about,” John cut in.

“Yes. All this time we’ve been shamefully ignoring the fruits of _your_ investigation. Oh, yes, there were fruits, John. Small ones. Nothing flashy or exotic. More strawberry than pineapple.”

“Give it a rest…” John began, but Sherlock wouldn’t.

“The person who took that revolver out of Harry’s car and planted it in the toilet tank had access to police information about this case but was not actually part of it. We should celebrate the anniversary of this day, John, as the historic occasion on which I admitted that Lestrade was right about something.”

John himself had already decided to celebrate the anniversary of this day, but for other reasons.

“Yes, let us accept Lestrade's hypothesis until something better inevitably comes along. Someone at the Yard saw this case as an opportunity to neutralize two of the few remaining people capable of telling my story—and perhaps to deal with Lestrade, of whom he is evidently still unsure. Lestrade may know that revolver was planted, but he can’t prove it; and with the murder weapon in his hand, he’d have no choice but to charge Harry. If he didn’t, then he’d be compromising the case out of loyalty to you, and they’d have a legitimate reason to sack him.”

“Yes. Right. So. Not Norwood,” John said. “Where _are_ we going next? Palace Gardens Terrace?”

Sherlock shook his head. “The police will still be swarming. No, you’ll start with Clara’s other vacant properties. She was into _something_ , and from her remark about ‘rent’ it’s likely that her secret revenue stream was coming from those empty houses. I assume Harry knows the locations.”

“I have them on my—“ Harry began, but John cut her off.

“What do you mean, ‘you’?”

“I'm being shot at," Sherlock said. "I no longer go abroad except under cover of darkness. While we wait for nightfall, there’s no need to let the case idle, as long as I can put my best man onto it.”

Sherlock gave John that “you’ll do anything for me, won’t you” smile.

“No,” John said.

Sherlock looked startled.

“The last time we split up, you died for a month.”

“But that was an extraordinary—“

“Not doing it, Sherlock. Not today. Today I am where you are. All day.”

Sherlock was about to argue, but John slipped a hand under the table and grabbed his knee, and he stopped. Sherlock looked at John. John looked at Sherlock. John and Sherlock looked at Harry.

John saw Sherlock smile. Harry saw it too, and her face fell.

“You’re not serious.” 

“We’ll maintain visual and audio contact,” Sherlock said. “If anything happens to you, we can spring into action. I’m fantastic at springing into action. It’s quite something, my springing into action, isn’t it, John?”

“Yes it is,” John answered.

Harry’s fingers drummed on the table.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Harry sighed. “Just tell me what you want me to do.”

Sherlock clapped his hands. “Excellent.” He began searching the pockets of his trenchcoat. John was struck suddenly by how easy all his movements were, how joyful. He was happy. Not just excited, stimulated, gleeful, triumphant, all the other things John had seen him be. Actually happy, in his body as well as his mind.

In the palm of Sherlock’s hand winked a glassy spherical object about the size of a large egg.

“Take this,” he said to Harry. “It’s a camera with an integrated microphone and speaker. It’s linked to the wifi receiver on John’s laptop. When he opens his browser you’ll get an alert and you can just press this button and you’ll be live. You’ll get audio input from us through the webcam built into John’s laptop. His laptop is configured to process _your_ input in a rather peculiar way right now, but with a few adjustments—“

“You bastard,” John shouted. “That _was_ you!”

“Partly,” Sherlock admitted. “The introduction was recorded but I could never get the interactive part to work properly. As a hacker I count myself second to none, but my programming skills are only average.”

“What are you talking about?” Harry demanded.

John looked at her. She was bearing up, but with the memories of the accident fresh in his mind, he knew better than to be fooled by her impassive eyes and her firmly set jaw. She was still grieving for Clara, in spite of everything. Probably somehow, irrationally, holding herself responsible for the death, as she had held herself responsible for Mary’s. And was, he realized with a pang of guilt, still holding herself responsible—because she still didn’t know about the envelope and the Easter egg.

“You’re really going to make me do this,” Harry said.

John felt bad about it. But thinking about leaving Sherlock in the apartment made him feel much worse.

Harry sighed. “All right. I’ll show you the addresses and then you tell me where to start.”

* * * *

“John,” Sherlock murmured. “Do you hear something?”

John could hear his own heartbeat, and the creaking of the bedsprings, and Sherlock’s breathing, but that was about it. Unless Sherlock meant that low, buzzing, irritating whine coming from the other side of the bedroom door.

“No,” he said, returning to the task at hand.

But Sherlock pushed him away and leapt off the bed. “That’s your laptop, John. Harry must be into the Notting Hill house.”

Sherlock rushed out the doorway, stark naked. John watched Sherlock’s disappearing backside, reminding himself that there was after all a third entity in this marriage, and that if he put himself into direct competition with Sherlock’s Work, the Work would win. 

John grabbed a dressing-gown and slipped it on. When he reached the table, Sherlock had pulled up a chair and crouching over the keyboard, staring at the screen.

“No, not yet, I need to see the doorframe. Good….good…can’t you reach any higher than that? Ah well, no matter, you may as well go through now…”

John went to see if he could find another dressing gown, or a sheet, or something to drape over Sherlock. It was after all his own sister, even if she couldn’t see them.

“John,” Sherlock called, with a new note of urgency. “Come look at this.”

“Shove over,” John said.

“No.”

“Fine.” John sat on Sherlock’s lap. Sherlock craned his neck to look over John’s shoulder.

The dusty pink and white wallpaper—a Victorian rosebud motif that had been very popular in the 1980s—and the dormer windows indicated an upper-storey bedroom. The floor was bare. A rug that had been pulled up was rolled up and stashed under the window. A pile of long, thin strips of wood was stacked in the corner. Hardwood flooring, waiting to be installed. There was no furniture. The door to the closet stood wide open.

Inside the closet was a stack of rectangular putty-colored objects wrapped in plastic, rounded at the corners, each about the size of a brick. They were ranged along one wall in neat rows. Piled against the other side of the wall was an assortment of wires and various electronic components and LED displays which looked as if they had been pried loose from larger devices. 

“Boys?” Harry was holding the camera, so she was not visible; but the anxiety in her voice was palpable. “Will you tell me what this is? Because it doesn’t look to me like something most contractors stock.”

John’s heart skipped a groove. It started up again, but faster than usual.

“Plastic explosives, most likely,” Sherlock observed.

“Holy…” Harry said. 

“Don’t be alarmed. They won’t go off unless they’re disturbed.”

The closet disappeared. The image swung in a sickening arc until they were looking at the door to the hallway, which approached rapidly.

“Listen, Harry, don’t panic,” John called. “There’s another bedroom across the hall, go see what’s in that closet.”

“The hell I will!”

“Harry,” Sherlock said, warningly.

“Fine.” 

Jerkily, the image bounced across the hallway and into what was evidently once a boy’s bedroom. Dark blue wallpaper with brown trim, peeling at some of the corners. Harry’s hand reached shakily into the frame to open the closet door.

Even Sherlock was impressed with this one. That many military-style assault weapons in one place would impress nearly anybody, let alone the pile of high-capacity magazines heaped up against the back wall.

“Clara!” Harry cried. “Christ almighty! What is the _matter_ with you? What are you _doing_ with all this shit?”

“Clara’s dead, Harry, she can’t hear you. Just keep calm and carry on.”

Muttering to herself, Harry stomped through the rest of the house. All the rooms were empty, all in an obvious state of half-repair, with tile stacked in the corners or wallpaper half-stripped. But every time Harry opened anything that had a closed door, there was a pile of something dangerous or illegal on the other side. When she opened a kitchen cupboard, an avalanche of stolen iPods cascaded onto her head, eliciting a stream of profanity.

“That’s it,” Harry said, as she flung them one by one back into their cupboard. “That is the limit. I’m leaving now.”

“I think we’ve seen enough,” Sherlock said.

As Harry stalked out, the text alert on her mobile went off. She pulled it out, started at it, and muttered a curse.

"All right," she said. "Which of you is responsible for subscribing me to Kitty Riley's twitter feed?"

"Sherlock?" John asked.

"I've been following it since Moriarty's trial," Sherlock said. "Not on my own mobile, of course, that got jettisoned when....anyway. On other people's devices. John's subscribed to her feed too now. It's like wading through the Augean Stables looking for a diamond, but one day, one day I will have something on her that will make her expose of me look like a puff piece. What's this one say?"

"It says," Harry said, with distaste, "At Bewley's for much-needed chocolate infusion. Fur still horridly fluffed up. TTFN, LOLkittys!"

"Still looking for the diamond, then," John remarked. 

Sherlock returned to the real world. “Where’s the next property located?”

There was an exasperated pause.

“Chelsea,” Harry said, unwillingly.

“Off you go then,” Sherlock sang.

The screen went dark, rather abruptly.

John turned around, putting his arms around Sherlock’s shoulders and looking into his eyes.

“This is better than sex for you, isn’t it,” John said.

“It’s far too soon to draw that conclusion, John,” Sherlock said. “I don’t have nearly enough data.”

Harry had another nine properties to investigate. There would be time to increase the data set.

* * * 

“John? JOHN!”

John started guiltily at the sound of Harry’s voice. He was still on Sherlock’s lap, but it had been a while since he’d paid any attention to the computer screen. Sherlock hissed out an aggrieved sigh, and let him squirm around and face the table.

The light in the room shown on the screen was very low. The windows had been completely blacked out; the only illumination came in through the doorway from the flight of steps leading down from the floor above. It was one of those sunken rooms, half below and half above ground level. The edges of the window frame had been sealed with something that looked like foam, and the walls also had a strange, nubbled, soft texture. 

“Yes, Harry?” John said, since Sherlock was still composing himself.

Harry’s fingers reached out to tentatively press down on the strange lumpy coating on the walls. “What is this?”

Sherlock sat forward, forgetting that John was wedged between himself and the table.

“Ow,” John said. 

“Some type of insulation,” Sherlock said. “The cracks have been sealed to prevent heat going in or out. Or…or else…”

The camera traveled up the walls to the tile in the ceiling, then across to the door, whose frame was outlined in the same dark foamlike stuff that had been used on the window.

“Soundproofing!” Sherlock shouted. “That’s what it is. I’ve seen this before—“

Harry made a noise of disgust. “Do I want to know why you would soundproof an empty room at the bottom of an empty house in Belgravia?”

“There are six possible answers that come to mind,” Sherlock began. 

The camera panned down the wall. A beam of light from Harry’s torch leapt through the gloom and splashed along the floor. It threw into relief a little heap of rubbish that had been piled against the wall, near the skirting board. It loomed larger as Harry approached it.

“Three of the activities that might require this modification are outré but quite innocent, one is technically legal but very questionable, and two—“

A scream crackled out of the computer speakers and raised the hairs on the back of John’s neck. The image was trembling because Harry’s hand was shaking; but she held it there all the same.

“Is that…are those…”

Yes. Among the balls of dust and wood shavings and the other sweepings, six loose human teeth. Torn out, evidently, by the roots.

“Get out of there, Harry,” John shouted.

“No!” Sherlock shouted. “No, this is the one, Harry. All the other things in all the other houses, the stockpiles of contraband and the kilos of cocaine and the weapons and the bomb-making materials and the stolen goods, all of that is just bread and butter, just ordinary criminal-underworld stuff. Those payments Clara was depositing are from people involved in illegal activities who pay her to use these places as holding facilities or operational bases. This one is special. This is the nerve center, it’s the flagship, if you look long and hard enough we will find the answers here. Go up to the top storey and start working down. Look into every room, every closet, look at everything, Harry. Everything. What we are looking for is in this house. I know it is.”

Harry was emitting, throughout this speech, a kind of high, muted wail; but the camera was jogging up the steps at a dizzying rate.

“Good girl, Harry. Three cheers for the Watson blood that makes such hardy souls. Up you go. Up. All right. Stop. Right to left. Be systematic, now, you’ll only want to do this search once. Yes. That door. Open that. Be careful, I wouldn’t rule out booby-traps.”

The door swung slowly open.

Dusty beams of light slanted in through the narrow bands between the blind and the edges of the windowframe. Harry’s torch carved a beam through the darkened space that came to rest on a table. A simple, square table, unpainted deal, on which a group of objects were ranged. They had been set out neatly, each in its own designated space. 

A heap of candy wrappers, glinting as the torch approached them with a sinister reflected light. Some slender paintbrushes, the kind used for watercolors, with narrow tapering bristles, coated with silver dust. A stoppered flask full of viscous, trembling, quicksilver. A block of red sealing wax, half-melted away. And lying at the end of the table, a soft heap of dark curly human hair, attached to scraps of gray and rotting skin.

“Sherlock,” John said. “That’s…the wrappers, the mercury, the brushes…all those things were found at that abandoned sweet factory when we searched it…”

“Harry,” Sherlock said quietly. “That inanimate yet strangely uncanny object at the end of the table. Will you hold that up to the light, please.”

Harry’s fingers lifted it, slowly and with horror. The torch caught it. The locks of hair were attached to the edges of a human face, flaccid and toothless, with dark brows over empty eyeholes, and lips that gaped obscenely around an irregularly shaped opening.

Sherlock held his breath.

“It’s a mask,” John heard Harry saying, far away as if in a dream. “It’s a mask…plastic or latex and there’s something…it looks like spirit gum, maybe, sticking to the edges…”

“Harry,” Sherlock barked. “Put it down and leave. Leave now. John and I will go back after dark. Just--”

“It’s all right, I’m over it now,” Harry said, replacing the mask on the table. “I won’t say this isn’t creepy, but I don’t think it’s dangerous. Let me at least go across the hall…“

“Harry, listen to Sherlock,” John shouted.

The camera traveled across the dark corridor, and the other door opened. 

This room was not dark. Its walls were lined with tiny blinking lights—red, white, yellow, green—that winked from black-bordered glassy consoles set into the walls. The camera traveled up, down, side to side…floor-to-ceiling technology, all powered by some hidden source of electricity. A chair on wheels pulled up near a desktop that spanned one wall, tucked in right where eleven small monitors created a mosaic of images. Each monitor was cycling through a series of pictures. Each image was of a different empty room. Harry turned the camera on the screen in the upper left hand corner.

A kitchen with its floors ripped out. A living room with bay windows, the hangings still there, the furniture gone. A master bedroom. A child’s bedroom. Another bedroom. A marble-floored bathroom. 

A room at the very top of a house, whose dusty floor was covered in footprints. A room festooned with caution tape. A room in which all the blinds were drawn, but one was waving gently in the breeze from an open window. A room in which, facing the window, a chair sat drawn up next to a card table on which sat a tablet computer, propped up on its folded cover, next to a half-drunk bottle of Evian, the mouldering remains of a prepackaged meal from Marks & Spencer, and a carton full of Chinese take-out, the chopsticks still poking out of it. Each item on the table had a small yellow label on it, scribbled with black ink. A uniformed police officer stood in one corner, playing some kind of game on her mobile. The seat and back of the chair were speckled all over with dark flecks, as if it had been spattered by black rain. Around the chair, in an irregular puddle, the unfinished yellow flooring was discolored by a dark, dark stain. Smaller stains spread around it, each with its own unholy shape.

The room in which Clara Adair had been shot.

The image on the monitor cycled back to the kitchen again.

“Oh no,” Harry said.

The camera flicked to the screen in the lower right corner. On the screen of that monitor was an image of Harry, holding that magic egg in her hand, her head distorted by the lens of a hidden camera located somewhere in the ceiling.

“Harry,” Sherlock whispered. “Turn around and leave the house quietly and casually. Act as if you belong there. Go.”

The image whirled a hundred and eighty degrees. The doorway lurched closer. 

“Clothes.” Sherlock snapped his fingers. “Find me. Something to wear. With shoes. I’m watching, Harry,” he said, quietly, as John rushed to the bedroom. “I won't talk because you need to listen carefully to the sounds around you. But I’m here.”

John charged back to the table with an armful of clothing. Sherlock began struggling into it, keeping his eyes glued to the computer screen. John looked over his shoulder.

The camera was jolting itself down the steps. One, two, three, Harry’s footsteps on the boards. 

A sound of scraping, somewhere behind her.

The image rocketed in a downward arc to the floor. There was a crack as the camera hit the ground. It spun wildly as Harry’s scream echoed through the apartment. The scream ended suddenly, with a muffled grunt. There was a crunch. The screen went dark.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” John whispered.

“Run down to the street and start hailing cabs,” Sherlock said, hopping on one leg as he shoved the other into a pair of John’s jeans. “Don’t take the first, second, or third that comes along. I’ll be down as soon as I’m dressed and WHO ARE YOU CALLING?”

John looked up from his mobile, fingers poised. “The police?” he ventured.

“ _No_ , John!” Sherlock roared, snatching the phone out of John’s hands. “The _police_? Are you mad? This is _their shop!_ ”

Sherlock got his other leg into the pants and did up the buttons. His fingers, and his mouth, were moving faster that John had ever seen them go.

“Those monitors and consoles were not boosted from some corner electronics store, John, that is state-of-the-art, government-issue surveillance technology. Much of it is standard police equipment but some of those toys are special order. There are things in that room I've never seen outside of--”

Sherlock stopped dead for a moment. Then he picked up the shirt, had a fit of frustration, threw it away and grabbed the trenchcoat. “Bring your revolver.”

“I don’t _have_ my revolver!”

Sherlock’s eyes flashed rapidly around the room. He caught up the discarded shirt, ran to the kitchen counter, hoisted the knife block, and wrapped the shirt around it. 

John tore the door open. Sherlock tucked the wrapped-up knife block under one arm and clattered down the stairs after him.

“Who is doing this?” John shouted, as he rounded the first turning of the stair. “It's not Moriarty. He's dead. He's dead, isn't he? Sherlock? Is there any possible way that Moriarty could not be dead?”

“It’s not Moriarty,” Sherlock panted. “I should have seen this coming weeks ago. Emotion, human feeling, all very exciting, yes, but it clouds the brain, it dulls the edge. Without it I would have had it all pieced together before Moriarty’s body ever struck the pavement. There is one man on earth, John, only one man, capable of outsmarting me. And his name was never Jim Moriarty.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The part where Harry is looking through the houses while they watch on the laptop is a nod to Hitchcock's Rear Window. If you haven't seen Rear Window, you should watch that right after you read The Moonstone.


	6. FAIRY TALE ENDING

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turns out this was not the end. There is now a seventh chapter. BUT THAT ONE IS THE LAST.

In the back seat of cab number four, lurching through the streets at breakneck speed, Sherlock set the knife block on the seat between them. Unwrapping the shirt, he began pulling the knives out by their handles and examining them one by one.

“This one should be yours, I think,” he said, offering John the paring knife. “The blade’s short, you’re less likely to stab yourself with it by accident and it’s sufficiently devastating at close range.” He drew out the carving knife, but then replaced it. “Handle’s weighted all wrong. Wouldn’t fly straight. What’s this one for?”

“I think that’s a bread knife.”

“Ooh, I like it. Long, thin, serrated, very nasty.”

“Sherlock!” John hissed, with a furtive glance at the back of the driver’s head.

“He’s on his Bluetooth, John, we could set off a grenade in here and he wouldn’t notice.”

“Stop playing with Harry’s knives and tell me what is going on!”

Sherlock settled on a mid-sized blade halfway between the paring and the carving knife. He tore off a shirtsleeve and began improvising a scabbard for it.

“That’s my sister in that house,” John whispered furiously. “You tell me who has her. Now.”

Sherlock finished the scabbard, tucked the whole ensemble through one of the trenchcoat’s belt loops, and began playing with John’s mobile.

“What are you doing?” John demanded.

“I’m looking up your post on that kidnapped banker,” Sherlock said. “Just to find out how much you remember, and how much I’ll have to remind you.”

“Assume I’ve forgotten everything. It’ll be faster.”

“Right. So our kidnapped banker, Trelawney, was one of a team of high-level executives working with the international derivatives market. He was abducted late at night from his office and held prisoner on the Dutch steamship Friesland, from which we eventually liberated him with some rather belated but still crucial help from our friend Lestrade. I’m sure you remember that part. You always lavish such detail on the chasing and fighting bits.”

“Faster, Sherlock.”

“That’s the second time today you’ve said that to me, and—“

John could not suppress a noise of rage.

“Right. Faster. The odd thing about that case was the lack of a clear motive. No ransom demand was ever made. Trelawney never saw or spoke to his captors. Trelawney was never injured or ill-treated. His abductors appear to have wanted nothing from him at all, except to have him out of the way for an indefinite period of time. But we found him, and we brought him back to the bosom of his family, and two days later what happens?”

“Just tell me, Sherlock.”

“Parliamentary hearings begin on the investigation into BIBI’s allegedly fraudulent and corrupt investing practices. Friend Trelawney testifies. On the strength of his testimony, several high-ranking BIBI executives are indicted. BIBI’s assets are revealed to be a tenth of what BIBI pretended them to be. The bank totters to its foundations. It does not fall, but the economic repercussions reverberate within Britain to this day. Take the paring knife, John, I hate to think of you going into this encounter naked.”

“You’re the one not wearing a shirt.”

“I mean unarmed.”

With a sigh, John took the paring knife, now wrapped in part of the decimated shirt’s other sleeve, and tried to get it through his belt loop without doing himself an injury.

“So you think Trelawney’s abductors wanted to keep him from testifying.”

“I don’t think it, I know it. Then we got poor Lestrade out of that mess he was in over the Nicoletti investigation.”

“Yes. And he gave you the hat.”

“The workings of your memory are a constant source of wonder for me, John. It seems that your ability to retain of a piece of information is inversely proportional to its importance. Once in gaol, Nicoletti was persuaded to cooperate with a police investigation into a drug trafficking ring which eventually dirtied a group of young executives tied to the British office of a large American investment banking firm. More scandal, more economic repercussions, this time imperiling the great Anglo-American friendship.”

The cab lurched around a corner. The streetlamps had been turned on as darkness fell, and John watched the dots and dashes of light flicker across Sherlock’s face. He thought that he had never seen Sherlock look sadder.

“Little Sherlock, so amusing, so inventive, with his imaginary friends and his pirate games,” Sherlock murmured. “Little Sherlock, smart as a whip, not a patch on Mycroft of course but then he’s two years younger. Little Sherlock makes himself useful, oh yes, he has fits of temper and he behaves atrociously but at the end of the day he does whatever Mycroft asks, he looks up to his big brother, isn’t it sweet. Some of Sherlock’s pranks are nasty, and Mycroft can be so cold, but they care for each other, they really do.”

John felt his innards slowly turning into lead.

“Let Sherlock play his games,” Sherlock resumed, softly. “They keep him out of trouble and they’re useful, especially when he can be persuaded to play with Mycroft. But sometimes his play gets out of hand. Sometimes the grownups have to take charge.”

It could be a trick of the light. But John thought he saw a tear spilling out of the corner of Sherlock’s eye, leaving a long shining track.

Overlaid on the image of Sherlock’s tear-streaked face was another face, much like it apart from the eyes and the mouth. John heard him, again, saying _we know that people like Moriarty exist_ …telling the story of how, while interrogating Moriarty, he had somehow managed to deliver him Sherlock’s whole life story… 

“Sherlock,” John whispered. “We’re going up against _Mycroft_?”

Sherlock pressed his lips together, and swallowed, and nodded.

John said, “I want the big knife.”

The car screeched to a halt. John thrust a bundle of notes through the window. Sherlock hesitated, then grabbed a fistful of knives out of the block. One after another they spilled out onto the pavement. The cab rattled away, with the empty knife block still rocking in the back seat. Sherlock seized John’s arm and dragged him down a laneway, over a wall, and behind a stand of bamboo that screened the corner of someone’s back garden.

Sherlock crouched down, deposited the knives, and laid John’s mobile on the ground between them. A map of London was on the screen, enlarged to show the part of Belgravia in which they had disembarked.

“Did you tell Mycroft you weren’t really dead?” John whispered.

“Of course not,” Sherlock whispered back. “I didn’t want him crowing over my ignominious defeat. But Mycroft _is_ the British government. He knows what they know. Which means he knows that Molly forged those documents. He must know I’m alive; but fortunately for Harry he doesn’t know how to find me.”

“Why for Harry?” John asked.

Sherlock’s eyes took on the metallic, reflective quality that indicated that he was committed to keeping some vital piece of information hidden from John. For his own good, naturally.

“Try not to care, John,” Sherlock said. “I need you to be clear-headed. So does she. You can do it. Detach. Be a doctor. Be a soldier. We have a building to take. There is at least one combatant, possibly more, probably armed. We want to do this without collateral damage. Now help me plan the attack.”

John looked at the map. He took a deep breath.

“Well, first of all,” he forced himself to say, “we’re going to have to split up.”

* * *

She was seated in a straightbacked wooden chair to which she was very uncomfortably strapped. Bands around her knees and ankles, one around her waist. Hands banded together at the wrist, and sitting useless in her lap. The bands were made of plastic stripping. No knots to untie; and there was nothing to cut it with. And nothing to see. Pitch black.

“You may remove the blindfold now.”

That changed very little. The room was almost completely dark. The door to the hallway had been left open a crack; a long, thin sliver of weak light fell diagonally across the floor and halfway up the opposite wall, where it shook into broken curves as it traced the bumpy surface of that soft, sound-absorbing foam.

“Return to your post. Shut the door behind you.”

The door swung open, giving Harry a brief, blurry vision of a tall, thin, dark silhouette. Her eyeglasses had been knocked off during the struggle. She wondered if they would return them to her once it was all over.

Get a grip, Harry.

Then the door closed, and the darkness was complete.

A beam of bright light sprang from one end of a lit torch, straight into Harry’s eyes. She turned her head, but she couldn’t quite escape it; and she could make nothing out in the darkness outside of the beam.

“Harriet Watson,” said a man’s voice.

It wasn’t an unpleasant voice. Soft, and measured, and somehow curiously reassuring.

“Don’t be afraid,” said the voice. “This is only the initial interview. If I find your conversation sufficiently edifying, there’s no need for our acquaintance to become any more intimate.”

There was something familiar about this voice.

“I’m glad to have this opportunity to chat,” the voice went on. “I still have some questions about Clara Adair. You might be just the person who could clear them up.”

Three or four smart-ass answers came to mind, but Harry thought it unlikely that any of them would improve an already precarious situation.

“We know she had a confederate in the Norwood caper. Was it you?”

“Yes,” Harry said. “It was me. I framed myself for Clara’s murder. Because that makes sense. Maybe this isn’t you after all, Mycroft. From John’s blog I always had the impression that Mycroft was smart.”

There was a soft chuckle.

“You shouldn’t have revealed that you know who I am, even to have the pleasure of contradicting me.”

What was I telling you about the smartass answers, Harry. This is not a game. 

“If it wasn’t you, maybe it was some other lover. Do you know if she started seeing anyone after you left?”

“I don’t know why you care, but I do know it’s not your business.”

“Everything is my business,” said the voice.

That didn’t seem to call for a response. She waited for the next thing to happen. The anticipation was terrible.

“Since you know, I may as well ask you now,” said the voice. “Where’s Sherlock?”

“Dead,” Harry answered.

“You don’t believe that.”

“Apparently he jumped off the roof of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital a month ago. Or so I read in the _Sun_.”

“He is alive and he is investigating Clara Adair’s death, using you and your brother as proxies. It wasn’t very nice of him to send you to all the dangerous locations while he warms his backside in some secure location. But that’s how he always used your brother. Sherlock treated him so badly, and yet John wouldn’t hear a word said against him. I always felt sorry for John. I feel sorry for you now.”

“Don’t,” Harry said. “I stopped feeling sorry for myself long ago.”

“Please do accept our apologies regarding Clara’s death,” said the voice. “An entirely regrettable incident, in so many ways. I hadn’t anticipated your continued attachment to her, after how you were treated; but knowing your brother I should have predicted it. It’s a shame. It is a barrier to our cooperation. But barriers can be overcome.”

Harry’s ears recognized the sound of a glass stopper being drawn from the neck of a decanter. And even in the dark, the sound of liquid being poured from a decanter’s narrow mouth into a tumbler half-full of ice was so precisely recognizable as to bring her forehead out in an unpleasantly cold sweat.

“I’m just pouring myself a drink,” said the voice. “Would you like one?”

“Fuck you,” Harry replied.

“There’s no need to be vulgar.” 

Harry heard him taking a sip. Her throat burned in sympathy.

“This is all for Sherlock’s own protection,” the voice went on. “He doesn’t understand. He’s not equipped to. His intelligence is analytical rather than synthetic. Deep and narrow, that’s Sherlock. He could discourse for hours about soil composition and tobacco ash, but he has no grasp whatever of macroeconomics or geopolitics.”

Another sip. Another phantom burn. 

“You’re sure you won’t join me?” said the voice. “I brought two glasses. No more ice, I’m afraid, but I suppose you take yours neat.”

Listening to him drink was going to drive her insane. Better to make some other kind of noise.

“I can’t stop thinking,” Harry said, “about the fact that what you’re doing right now does not fall under any legally formulated definition of torture. You’re simply asking me questions while you sip at your whiskey and politely offer to share. You haven’t explicitly threatened me. You’re holding me against my will, but I’m sure there’s a statute somewhere on the books that allows you to do that for limited periods of time. You haven’t laid a hand on me. I don’t suppose that _you_ will. Your taciturn friend, the one who stuck his knees in my kidneys and ground my face into the floor and blindfolded me and dragged me in here and attached me to his chair, he’s a different story; but by the time _he_ starts in on me you will be very far away. Probably at the Diogenes Club, having the exact same drink fetched in to you on a little silver tray.”

“Isn’t that the best argument of all for cooperating with me now?” said the voice.

Harry was silent.

“So how is your investigation progressing?” said the voice. “Why don’t you tell me how far you’ve got. Maybe I could help.”

“I know my last name isn’t Holmes,” said Harry. “But I don’t _think_ that makes me as stupid as all that.”

“Plenty of time yet to find out,” said the voice.

He took another sip. This time, the sound was drowned out by faraway thunder. A succession of thumps and bangs, happening far above Harry’s head, and punctuated finally by a startling howl of pain.

With a burning click, three bare lightbulbs screwed into the ceiling fixture turned on.

The room glared into life. The soundproofed walls, the heap of rubbish, the tiny end table, the heavy crystal decanter full of amber liquid, the empty tumbler and the drink in the hand of a tall, thin man in a slim and elegant suit. He had a pale face, a prominent forehead, and reddish-brown hair, and he was sitting in a folding chair planted between her and the door.

“Forgive me,” said Mycroft, setting his drink down on the table. “There’s a call I simply must make.”

The knob on the door behind him rattled, and clicked, and finally turned. The door flew open as if it had been kicked. Through the open doorway leapt a roaring maniac wrapped in a black trenchcoat and wearing a pair of John’s trainers, brandishing a utility knife in one hand and a slicer in the other, with a breadknife clenched between his teeth. 

Mycroft leapt to his feet and spun around. And then he began laughing so hard he dropped his mobile.

“By God,” Mycroft laughed. “It’s the Dread Pirate Sherlock!”

The utility knife went whistling across the room, nearly parting Mycroft’s hair before embedding itself in the windowframe. Sherlock grabbed the breadknife with his free hand and shouted, “Hands in the air, Mycroft! Now!”

Mycroft was still laughing. Harry began discreetly hopping the chair toward the window.

“I’m glad to see you’re in one piece,” Mycroft said. “I was worried about you.”

“No you weren’t. Comply with my request, please.”

Straining up and tilting forward, Harry could just about grab the knife. She pulled it out of the foam and went to work with it on the plastic stripping. Too bad he hadn’t thrown the breadknife. It would have been faster.

“I don’t think so, Sherlock.”

Mycroft reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a very small handgun with a mother-of-pearl handle. 

“Avast there and drop the cutlasses, me hearty,” said Mycroft. “Please. It’s only fun until someone gets hurt. You don’t want to break Mummy’s heart.”

The second knee strip yielded. One more left.

“You don’t either,” Sherlock said, carving the air with both hands.

“I don’t care, Sherlock,” Mycroft said, with a kind of weary patience. “I’ve never cared. Mummy is one person. You are one person. I am one person. I do not care for people. I care for England, Sherlock. Always England. This is what you are incapable of understanding.”

Mycroft looked at the gun, and sighed.

“The bullets are small-caliber,” he mused, “and surely there is a doctor in the house. John has experience with gunshot wounds and emergency medicine. You’ll probably get back most of your brain function. Not all of it, of course. But in the long run, making you ordinary is the only way to keep you alive.”

Mycroft raised the gun. 

Sherlock lifted the breadknife.

Harry leapt to the end table, wrapped both hands around the neck of the crystal decanter, and swung it as hard as she could at the back of Mycroft’s head.

* * *

The blood made John’s hands slippery, and the tall man was still struggling. But at last John got the power cord wrapped tight around his wrists and knotted it. After fastening the man’s booted ankles with another cord, John grabbed his captive by the shoulder of his bloodsoaked dark shirt and flipped him over. Struggling to his feet, John nearly slipped in the still-expanding slick of blood on the floor. The dancing red, white, green and yellow lights played over the man’s contorting face.

John withdrew the paring knife from the man’s left bicep and stuck it point first into a floorboard. He picked up the gun that had coasted to a stop underneath the desk, put on the safety, and stuck it into a pocket. Then he unwound the shirtsleeve that was still stuck in his belt loop, and began converting it into a bandage.

It was only after he had the bandage knotted over the wound and started applying pressure that he realized he had seen this man before.

“Hello,” John said. “That was you in the car park the other day, wasn’t it? Taking my revolver out of Harry’s glove box?”

The man gritted his teeth and remained silent.

“But I’m sure I saw you somewhere before that,” John said, taking a seat on the man’s stomach. “I’m just trying to work out where. The Diogenes Club, perhaps? No, no. You’re too young.”

Come on, Sherlock. Find her. Find her and bring her back. I need to know you are both alive. Right now.

Detach.

The man had stopped struggling. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, but he wore a look of complete abstraction. He was inside, dealing with the pain.

“Don’t worry,” John said. “You’ll have to change your weightlifting routine for a few months, but it’s not serious. The blood, yes, that’s unsettling. But it looks worse than it is. I’m a doctor. I know.”

Look at his face and think about placing it. Don’t think about Harry, or about Hippocrates.

“I know where,” John finally cried. “At that press conference. When Lestrade gave Sherlock the hat. You were sitting next to Lestrade at the big table. You…”

The man turned his face away. A commotion in the doorway brought John’s head around, one hand going to the strange gun in his pocket.

It was Harry. And behind her, Sherlock. And slung over Sherlock’s shoulder, the front end of an unconscious Mycroft, his hair matted with blood that was still oozing from a nasty gash in the back of his head.

“John!” Harry shouted, sounding very close to tears. “Thank God you’re—uuurgh.”

“Don’t worry about the blood,” he said, as the color drained out of Harry’s face. “It looks like pints and pints, but really it’s not. Just be careful…it’s slippery…”

“I am not going in there,” Harry said.

“No need,” Sherlock interjected. “Come with me, John.”

“Where are we going, and what happened to Mycroft?”

“You can ask Harry what happened to Mycroft. We are going up to the roof.”

“Sherlock…you’re not…”

“Please, John. I do not plan to re-enact the book of Genesis. I am merely indulging in what I fancy is a highly effective bit of stagecraft. Come out in the hallway and give me a hand with this trapdoor. You can leave our friend Sebastian in the puddle. I don’t think he’s allowed to scratch himself without a direct order from Mycroft.”

“Sebastian?” John repeated.

“The gentleman in whose blood you are currently wallowing, John, is Sebastian Moran, head of surveillance operations at New Scotland Yard. He is also the man who shot Clara Adair.”

“Oh is he,” Harry said.

“I share this information with you because you have a right to it, Harry, but I do ask that you not interfere with him. We need him as a witness.”

“Don’t worry,” John said, now very conscious of the bright red drops falling from his hands to the floor. “Harry’s opposed to…you know….”

“Killing,” Harry finished for him. 

John saw Sherlock glancing at both of them, mentally noting that Mary’s accident was not after all the sole source of their estrangement.

“Excellent. In that case, Harry, will you please step into the room opposite and take numerous photos of everything on that table. Do be sure to get a good image of the Sherlock mask. It’s cruder than the one Molly made, but we should still be able to see the resemblance. Then post them to John’s Facebook page, under whatever caption may suggest itself to you. Include the address, and be sure to tag Lestrade. His first name is Greg.”

“What’s John’s password?” Harry shouted, as John reached up to the pull chain dangling from a rectangular trap door in the ceiling of the hallway.

Sherlock extracted the mobile from his pocket and passed it to Harry. “It’s lovedoctor99.”

“How about ‘Grimm Discovery?’” Harry called back, as she entered the room. 

“Two ‘m’s,” Sherlock called.

“Naturally. Should I update his relationship status while I’m at it?”

“NO!” John and Sherlock shouted, simultaneously.

A stepladder came flying through the opening in the ceiling, striking the floor. John jumped out of its path, bumping into Sherlock.

“You know my password,” he remarked, beginning the climb.

“I don’t know why these things surprise you, John,” said Sherlock. “Here, take him by the shoulders and we’ll haul him up together. Thank God the diet worked. Five years ago he wouldn’t have fit through the opening.”

* * *

Laid out on the slates of the roof, Mycroft lay inert for several minutes before beginning to twitch. John straddled his chest, pinning both arms down, and peered into his face. He was relieved when Mycroft’s eyes fluttered open. Mycroft’s pupils were the same size; his eyes were focused on John’s face; and his expression indicated exactly the right mixture of chagrin, anger, and affected nonchalance.

“What’s your name?” John said. “What day is it? Who’s the prime minister?”

“My brain is in perfect working order, Dr. Watson,” Mycroft sneered. “No need for the concussion questions.”

“Very well,” said Sherlock. “Let’s move on to something a little more challenging.”

Sherlock had perched on top of the air conditioning unit, his legs drawn up, elbows resting on both knees, fingertips touching, eyes gazing up into the hazy London night sky.

“I’m going to tell you a story, Mycroft,” he said. “A fairy tale. Do listen attentively, and be sure to stop me if I get anything wrong.”

“If you think I will just lie here and listen to one of your smug perorations—“

John held up the paring knife.

“I know where all the veins and arteries are,” John said. “I also know several thousand different places in which I could cut you without actually endangering your life.”

Mycroft sighed, and assumed—as best as he could in the position he was in—an air of bored nonchalance.

“Once upon a time, long ago, before the nickname ‘Boffin’ had been bestowed upon him,” Sherlock began, “there was a little boy named Sherlock who liked to solve puzzles. He called himself a consulting detective and with the help of his annoying friend Greg, he solved lots of puzzles and made lots of people happy. Sherlock himself was not happy; but since neither Sherlock nor anyone else in Sherlock’s family had ever been happy, he didn’t mind. He was busy, and clever, and pushing himself to the limit, and that was what he liked.”

“This is a very twee beginning,” Mycroft said.

“It gets darker. Sherlock maintained a brilliant but little-read website called ‘The Science of Deduction.’ It had very few followers. But one day, after Sherlock and his new friend John had been on something of an adventure together, Sherlock heard from a dying man that his website had a fan named Moriarty.”

“Oh here we go,” Mycroft muttered.

John put a hand around Mycroft’s throat. Just to have it there, in case.

“Some people think that Moriarty was made up. But he wasn’t. Oh no. Moriarty was playing his games long before little Sherlock hung out his shingle. Even before Sherlock’s big brother Mycroft became the British government. Moriarty was real. Real enough to kill quite a startling number of people in ingeniously clever ways. Real enough to build a criminal empire in the heart of London. Real enough to fit Sherlock’s friend John up with a bomb and nearly blow him to bits beside an empty swimming pool. He didn’t do it in the end; but John has never forgotten those ten minutes and _believe me_ neither has Sherlock.”

John looked up. Sherlock’s face was half in darkness, but the look in his eyes gave John chills.

“At first, Moriarty was a good playmate for little Sherlock. But what is it you said, Mycroft. It’s only fun until someone gets hurt.”

The shift in tone made Mycroft’s body tense with anxiety.

“After that night, Moriarty’s games weren’t much fun for Sherlock any more. But Moriarty had other playmates. He had his friend Sebastian down at the police station. Sebastian had all kinds of toys and he knew all kinds of things and he loved getting rich and he loved getting dirty. When a little girl named Clara was looking for a way to make some money, Sebastian told her how she could rent out all her empty houses even though none of them were inhabitable. Sebastian requisitioned or stole or otherwise got his hands on a full surveillance kit that he had installed in this house, so that Moriarty could keep an eye on all of Clara’s properties. That way he didn’t have to post guards whose presence might draw the attention of the neighbors. They got used to the empty houses being there and stopped paying attention. The police never looked in; the empty houses were all in nice neighborhoods full of nice people who are hardly ever arrested. It was a brilliant scheme.”

Sherlock dropped his legs of the side of the air conditioning unit, planting his feet on the floor, leaning forward.

“But Mycroft knew about Moriarty. Mycroft is the British Government. He knows everything. He knows who’s been good and who’s been bad and who’s clean and who’s dirty. Mycroft knew about Sebastian too. Mycroft liked knowing about them. He liked knowing exactly where all the criminal activity was. He liked how Moriarty controlled something that would otherwise be pure chaos. He liked it that Moriarty had crime organized. He liked it that whenever he or the British Government needed a special favor he could blackmail the man who was in charge of the police force’s surveillance operations. He liked it that when something Moriarty did became truly dangerous, Sebastian could see to it that it was stopped. And the British Government liked all of that too. So the British Government said, we’ll let Moriarty play his games, we’ll let Sebastian play too. But keep an eye on them both, Mycroft, and be sure not to let the games get out of hand.”

John glanced at Mycroft. His eyes stared straight up, not appearing to see anything, and his face wore a look of exhausted resignation.

“And then one day, the British Government—or maybe it was Mycroft, I get them confused—had an idea. The British Government knows that the most important thing in the world is to keep the British Government safe and the British Economy strong. Well, strong is perhaps beyond their reach; let’s say one notch above ‘reduced to rubble.’ The British Government knows that sometimes this means doing things that ordinary people might think were not very nice. Sometimes the British Government might need for someone to disappear for a while. Sometimes the British Government might need to let bad people go free. Sometimes the British Government might _really, really need_ information. But the British Government can’t be dirty. The British Government has to be clean. So when the British Government needs, for instance, to persuade someone very very stubborn to give them information that will help keep the country safe, the British Government can’t just pull out half a dozen of that man’s teeth one by one in a soundproofed room.”

Mycroft started, involuntarily.

“No, no, no. The British Government has rules to follow. But that’s why it’s so nice that Mycroft knows all these people who love to get dirty and who don’t follow rules and who can be ruined forever in a moment if they don’t do exactly what Mycroft says. That's why Mycroft occasionally even gives Sebastian a little gift now and then. A little carrot to go with the sticks. A few special toys, to help him watch and listen--so they can watch and listen too.”

“What you’re saying right now is tantamount to treason, Sherlock.”

Mycroft’s voice was calm, but his pulse was not.

“Some might say that you are the traitor here, Mycroft; but since I’ll never actually prove that part of it the question is moot.”

“You don’t understand. You can only see the puzzle you’re working on at the moment—you got personally involved with that Adler woman and scuttled a joint covert counterterrorism operation that had taken months to plan--“

Sherlock sprang off the air conditioner, crouched near Mycroft’s head, and grabbed him by the knot in his tie. John moved off to give Sherlock more room. 

“I know that was bad, Mycroft, but that’s not why you did this to me.”

“Did what?” Mycroft snapped.

“It was the banks. Two cases in a row that led to major banking scandals. The banks never cleaned house after the crash, we both know that. The global economy still teeters on the brink of collapse. There’s so much dirt and corruption still out there, so many many things that might cause another crash, a worse crash, if they came to light. And the more famous I got and the richer my clients became the more often I would find that dirt. And I’m not rational, am I, _nothing matters more to me than solving the puzzle_. I can’t be reasoned with, I can’t be controlled, I can’t be bribed, it’s not easy to intimidate me, the only honey trap that ever worked was Irene Adler who’s supposed to be dead—“

“Wait,” John said. “ _She’s_ not dead either?”

“—and thanks to John’s blog and that stupid hat the public love me, so the next time I pull on a thread that unravels a bank that’s too big to fail, it will fail anyway, and then _what are you going to do?_ When the dominoes fall and the depression hits, _what will become of the British Government?_ So there’s only one thing for it. For the good of the economy, for the good of the country, for the good of Mycroft and the British Government, Sherlock has to stop playing his games. And the only way to make him stop is to destroy him.”

“Sherlock,” John said, “say that again, slowly.”

“I was trying to _save you,_ you puerile whingeing narcissistic _dick!_ ”

Mycroft sat up and spat his words into Sherlock’s face. John had never seen him so angry. He’d never seen Mycroft show any emotion at all that went beyond the boredom/irritation range.

“You can cling to whatever fantasies you like, Sherlock, but I am _not_ the British Government. Not all of it. You may as well know that in certain circles, you have been considered a dead man ever since the Adler escapade. I have spent every month since trying to keep you off the termination list. But after the BIBI hearings and the Nicoletti evidence I couldn’t persuade them any more. You were a threat to the commonwealth and you were to be neutralized. The best I could do was make them promise to let me handle it my way.”

The shock on Sherlock’s face made John hurt all over. It was one thing for him to be spinning out his theory as he did at the end of so many cases. It was totally, viscerally different to see his own brother confess to it.

“I had Moriarty picked up and I interrogated him. I gave him the idea of exposing you as a fraud. I gave him the information he would need to do it.”

“You told me you made a mistake,” John said, pointedly.

“ _You_ told me I made a mistake,” Mycroft replied. “I lied to you. I lie to you frequently. You’re easy to lie to. Sherlock does it too. I knew what I was doing. I gave him your childhood, your awkward years, the whole narrative. And I told him that I was doing this because we knew that he had something extraordinary. A few lines of code that could open any door. I bribed and threatened and begged him to give it to us. He knew he didn’t have it; he knew it couldn’t exist. But he loved the idea that we _thought_ he had it. In his limited way, Moriarty had vision. He saw the possibilities immediately. I’d told him that your programming skills were sub-par.”

“You would have done all this, of course, in such a way that Moriarty believed that my fall was entirely his own idea,” Sherlock said.

“Of course.”

The two brothers stared at each other. A rising wind stirred Sherlock’s hair and fluttered the edges of his trenchcoat. In the distance, John could hear the car horns and, farther off, the sound of police sirens.

“Kidnapped children,” John remarked.

Mycroft glanced at him with withering contempt.

“I just mention them,” John said. “Since they were part of this plan for dealing humanely with the problem of Sherlock. Kidnapped children, held in an abandoned sweet factory and fed poisoned chocolates.”

Mycroft made a noise of irritation. “Oh, that was all Moriarty’s idea.”

“Was it,” John bit off.

“Of course it was. Moriarty was very clever, but he was also an unstable lunatic who was obsessed with the idea of being Sherlock’s evil twin. That’s why I chose him as the instrument of Sherlock’s termination. Our own people are nearly 100% effective. But I thought it quite likely that in a fight to the death with Moriarty, Sherlock would ultimately prevail. And as usual, I was right.”

Mycroft got to his feet at the same time as Sherlock. They studied each other, waiting to see who would make the first move. John rose slowly from his crouch, eyes darting warily from one to the other.

“The beauty of the Reichenbach Fall,” said Mycroft, “is that if, as I hoped, Sherlock survived, he would be neutralized. As a fraud he couldn’t get himself into any more trouble, and my colleagues might be persuaded to leave him alone. And Moriarty, of course would be dead. If Sherlock didn’t survive, well, Britain is safer with either one of them than it is with both. The great puzzle-bomb caper was ample proof of that. Let those two go on playing with each other and the whole island would be up in smoke.”

“I knew it,” Sherlock hissed. “He was not smart enough to manipulate me that way. But you are. You set me up. You set me up and then you watched me fall.”

“I didn’t want you to die, Sherlock,” Mycroft said, calmly.

“Perhaps you didn’t,” Sherlock spat. “Perhaps, as you watched Moriarty backing me into a corner, you calculated the odds and told yourself that they were slightly in my favor. Perhaps your clandestine chats with John were an attempt to give me a sporting chance.”

“Perhaps,” Mycroft said, with an infuriating half-smile. 

“You may not have _wanted_ me to die but you certainly expected me to. At least you were preparing for it.”

“How do you know that?” John interrupted.

“That mask Harry’s posting pictures of right now,” Sherlock said. “Moriarty wore that when he abducted those children, he wore it when he locked them into the sweet factory. That made me the face of their kidnapper. That’s why the girl screamed the instant she saw me. The mask was found with all the other evidence at the crime scene, but it was found by someone—Sebastian or one of his confederates—who made sure that Lestrade never saw it, that Donovan and Anderson never saw it, and that John and I never saw it. Sebastian brought it to you. You added it to the rest of the evidence and kept the whole kit together on that table down below. And when I had been dead for long enough, you’d return the evidence to where it came from and see to it that it was re-examined. The mask would be discovered, and the scream that started it all would finally be explained. The honor of the family would be restored, and Mummy’s heart would unbreak just a tiny bit.”

“And mine too, Sherlock,” said Mycroft. “Just a little.”

“Don’t speak to me about your _heart_ , Mycroft. Trying to save me? By helping my most dangerous enemy weave a net round me and then hoping perhaps little Sherlock would be clever enough to find a hole. You didn’t stop your friend Sebastian from erasing me at the Yard, or from sniping at me from rooftops whenever I emerged from the underworld, or from framing Harry for murder and making John an accessory.”

“You should have left it to me, Sherlock,” Mycroft said. “You should have left the Watsons to their fate and gone on playing dead. Because you can’t come back. That’s been made quite clear to me. You can play dead, or you can become dead.”

“Ah, but things are different now,” Sherlock said. “Because now, Clara Adair is really dead.”

He was smiling. Mycroft didn’t like that smile. John himself was of two minds about it.

“Sebastian Moran was Clara’s contact with Moriarty, Limited,” Sherlock said. “He’s the one who got her into the business of leasing to criminals, charging a sliding scale based on how illegal the activity was. He’s the one she went to when she needed a corpse. He’s the one who told her she could have 83 Palace Gardens Terrace all to herself while they worked on pulling together her forged documents. After all, at the time, it wasn’t in use. And that way, he could keep an eye on her. And so he happened to notice when a visitor came to see Clara at around five o'clock that evening.”

Mycroft reached into a pocket. He felt around in it, concerned to find it empty.

“Harry has all of your mobile devices,” Sherlock said. “Including the ones you had secreted in the lining of your waistcoat. The cavalry will not be coming for you. Not tonight. And neither you nor Sebastian Moran will have the opportunity to delete the surveillance footage of that room at the top of 83 Palace Gardens Terrace. The footage that will show Sebastian Moran bursting into that room and putting two bullets into Clara’s head. One was meant for her visitor; but for better or for worse, she was too quick, and it found Clara instead.”

“You don’t know any of this,” Mycroft said. “I can always tell when you’re bluffing.”

“That’s been a lie since I was twelve years old,” said Sherlock. “Sebastian would have called you afterward and told you what happened. But by then, the visitor had called the police. She didn’t tell the whole story; she’s not _very_ bright but she was smart enough not to want anyone naming her as a witness to a shooting like this. You didn't have time clean up the crime scene and dispose of the body. There isn't even a rubbish bin or bag or anything you could hide the evidence in. The best you could do would be rearrange it a little, to throw the police off the trail. So you pocketed Clara’s mobile, wiped out everything stored on that tablet, put the body back in the chair, and set up the table to make it look as if Clara had been eating peacefully alone and watching something on iTunes when two bullets flew into that house from a clear sky. But that’s not how it happened. For one thing, John can tell you that the neighborhood architecture makes it nearly impossible for a sniper to shoot into that room and hit someone sitting in a chair. For another, there are blood flecks on the seat and back of the chair, so Clara can’t have been in it when the bullets hit. Harry said Clara left the Norwood house with nothing but her mobile; so is that really her tablet on the table? Two takeaway meals on the table, one from Marks  & Sparks and one from a Chinese takeout. The same person did not eat both of those meals. And is Clara, high-maintenance, high-living, weight-obsessed Clara, really going to risk exposure over some oil-sodden, MSG-laced, high-sodium foodlike substance?”

Mycroft was still going through pockets and patting linings and looking more and more unsettled.

“No, the Chinese food and the tablet were brought into that room by someone else. Someone who arrived with the tools of her trade, prudently stopping off for some crispy beef on the way because she expected it would be a long interview. Someone whose star is on the ascent in the world of journalism ever since she laid mine low. Someone who tweeted to all of her followers—she calls them her ‘LolKittehs,’ I know, it’s vile but all the same it’s evidence—at 7:50am on the day that Clara was shot, that she knew this would be a great day, because she'd spend it pursuing—“prowling” is how she puts it, the cat conceit continued, you know—a monstrously luscious scoop involving sex, drugs, _and_ money.”

Mycroft made a sudden movement. Sherlock’s left leg flashed out and connected with the pit of Mycroft’s stomach. Mycroft hit the slates. As he rose, John sent him back to the roof with a punch that made his whole right arm sting. Both the Holmes boys were evidently equally hard-headed.

“Thanks, John, I believe that’s plenty,” Sherlock said. “Mycroft has never gone in for physical culture.” Sherlock dropped to one knee next to the prostrate Mycroft and leaned over, hissing into his face. 

“Harry said Clara was desperate to find some liquidity. The trust payments wouldn’t be enough. Obviously our Clara was a _much_ naughtier girl than any of us knew. She needed something she could turn into cash. And all she had was what she knew. A luscious scoop involving sex, drugs, and money. Clara was the daughter of Ronald Adair, chief financial officer of British International Banking  & Investment. Clara liked to party. She knew some things that Trelawney didn’t. Things that would interest a tabloid reporter like Kitty. Things that an ambitious and up and coming tabloid reporter like Kitty would be willing to pay for.”

Sherlock grabbed Mycroft’s lapels and began dragging him toward the edge of the roof, bumping the back of his head all along the way. John followed anxiously. He was keenly aware of his own burning desire to see Mycroft’s smug face bashed in, and concerned about what desires might be raging in Sherlock right now.

“You would have known what Kitty was there for. But not Sebastian. All Sebastian’s thinking about is the fact that he just helped Clara commit murder. He sees her there on the monitor, talking to a very recognizable tabloid reporter who is taking copious notes. She's just died and is planning to start over. She could be giving Kitty her whole dead self's life story. The murder, the houses, the things stored in the houses, everything. He needs to silence both of them. He dashes out to Palace Gardens Terrace. He’s a crack shot at a distance; but he’s been behind a desk for a while, and he bungles his entrance. He gets Clara twice, but Kitty’s out the window and climbing down the ivy on the back wall before he can get to her. He flees the scene and informs you of the catastrophe. You go out to the property, assess the situation, and do the little you can before the response team arrives--and traps you in the house. You flit from room to room, always avoiding their gaze, looking for a clear exit. I won’t go looking for that on your surveillance tapes; you’d have taken the care to disable the cameras at 83 Palace Gardens Terrace before you went there. But my guess is you saved Sebastian’s performance. Just to make him a little _more_ blackmailable, a little _more_ your creature.”

John couldn’t read the expression on Mycroft’s face; but Sherlock was evidently satisfied with it.

“I thought so. Clara, of course, has no identification, and you’ve taken her mobile, so it takes the policea few hours before they realize that the corpse they found in that locked room is the same corpse that Lestrade found incinerated in a frog pond in Norwood. When Lestrade's arrival distracts everyone, you get your chance, and finally make it to the back garden, where you slip out through a door in the wall. A tricky situation well handled. But it was careless of you to allow John to blunder into you in that laneway.”

John closed his eyes in shame. “It was _Mycroft._ ”

“You said you’d assumed, after I returned, that it must have been me, but you couldn’t say why,” Sherlock said, glancing up at him. “Now you know. But I don’t blame you for not placing him. We’re brothers, after all. But except intellectually, we are _nothing_ alike.”

Sherlock gave Mycroft’s shoulders another push. Mycroft’s head was dangling off the edge of the roof now, twisting about from side to side as if looking for something.

“This is where you put me,” Sherlock screamed. “You are not a brain in a vat, Mycroft, you are an organic creature, a bag of skin and guts just like all those contemptible _people_ you’re so proud of not caring about, and if you fall, you will break.” Sherlock shook him harder. “How does it feel to be on the edge, Mycroft? What are your sensations at this moment? _Tell me how you feel!_ ”

John burst forward, grabbed Sherlock by the shoulders, and tossed him back on the roof, away from the edge. He seized Mycroft by the tie and threw him to safety. 

“We’re going downstairs,” he said, his breath loud in the silence. “We’re getting off this roof. No more falls. Sherlock, open the trap.”

Sherlock didn’t move. Neither did Mycroft. 

In John’s jacket pocket, a phone rang.

John reached in and looked at the screen.

“It’s Lestrade,” John said. “All things considered, I think I’ll take it.”

John turned around. “Greg? Yeah, where are you?”

Mycroft leapt to his feet. He turned, and ran.

Sherlock was off after him. But Mycroft darted to the edge of the roof and took a flying leap over it, dropping out of sight.

Forgetting all about Lestrade, John swung around and ran. He pulled up short at the edge, right next to Sherlock.

“I might have known it,” Sherlock said. “There’s an extension.”

At the back of the house, the lower storeys had been built out. Mycroft had dropped ten feet onto the roof of the extension, and was making his way, with much halting and confusion, down the drainpipe on the corner.

“You let him go,” John said.

“Yes.” Sherlock stared off into the darkness. “I let him go.”

"Because?" John prompted.

"Well you know what they say," said Sherlock. "If you love something, let it go. And then maybe the sense of gratitude, combined with some residual fraternal affection, will compel it to tell its friends to stop trying to kill you."

An excited buzzing came from the mobile. John put it back up to his ear. 

“Yes. The scream. Yes, that’s exactly how Moriarty did it. I knew you would. Listen, we’ve caught Clara’s murderer too. Name of Sebastian Moran. You know him?”

Sherlock laughed. Even he could hear the burst of profanity with which Lestrade greeted this revelation.

“Bring a car down to the address posted with the photos. And—“

Sherlock was still laughing. Laughing louder and louder, and actually, as he dropped to a sitting position on the slates, holding his sides.

“What do I mean we? What do you think I—oh. Yes. Hm. Well. Funny story...Turns out Sherlock’s still alive.” There was a silence. “Greg? Hello? Are you all right?”

Another burst of profanity from the phone, even louder and more pungent. The only words that Sherlock could clearly distinguish were "that," "miserable," and "fucker."

Sherlock stretched out on his back, arms and legs splayed to both sides, still laughing. Laughing until the tears came, looking straight up at the night sky.

* * * *

“Well,” Harry said, looking around at the living area. “I guess I’ll leave you.”

Sherlock had rather pointedly fallen asleep on the couch. John was anxious to be alone with him too, but he was also unexpectedly anxious about saying goodbye to Harry, even for one night.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I think the excitement is over, for me. Until the trial, at any rate.”

They looked at each other in silence.

“Thanks for coming for me,” she said. "I'm glad I'm not still being held captive in a soundproofed basement with a decanter full of whiskey, six human teeth, and Mycroft fucking Holmes." She shuddered. "I sincerely hope that is the worst thing that ever happens to me.”

“I'm sorry about that,” John said. “We didn't know it would be so dangerous. Listen, Harry…”

He picked up the cream-colored card off the table. He handed it to Harry.

“This is what was in that envelope.”

Harry read the three words.

“So he deduced it,” she said. “I suppose it was the scars.”

John whispered, “You _knew_?”

She looked up at him, and her eyes suddenly seemed twenty years older.

“I don’t remember the accident,” she said. “I assumed at first that the investigators were right. Everyone said so. You believed them. I thought it had to be my fault. It seemed, then, as if everything was.”

Harry handed the card back to him.

“But I look at these scars every day. When I was ready to forgive myself, I saw it. And you saw it too, when you were ready to forgive me.”

“I’m sorry,” John said. “All those years—and we were all wrong—“

Harry shook her head. “You had so many legitimate reasons to be angry with me about that. Mary drove because I couldn’t. So she was the one who took the impact. Is it my fault that she’s dead? Or the fault of the lorry driver? Or was it just her time? You can’t know these things. You take the actions you take and you hope you are strong enough to own the consequences. That’s all.”

She looked at the couch, where Sherlock was snoring loudly.

“I’m glad you went for the upgrade,” she said. “It’s risky, of course. But risk is life.”

“Thank you, wise woman of the mountain,” Sherlock murmured.

“All right,” Harry said. “I’m going.” She shouldered her bag and walked to the door.

“I love you, John,” she said. “I know it's embarrassing, but I want to say it.”

John wanted to say it back, but he couldn’t bring himself.

“I’ll see you in the morning, yeah?”

Harry smiled. “Yes. Not too early. Good night, Sherlock. I know you can hear me.”

The door closed. John went up and locked it in every way he could.

Sherlock sprang upright, instantly alert. “Oh my God, I thought she would never leave. Let’s go to bed.”

John sat next to him. “You ungrateful sod. After she nearly brained Mycroft for you.”

“I expressed my gratitude by saving her neck. I can stop now. So can you. Come on.”

“Sherlock,” John said, fifteen minutes later.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry about Mycroft.”

Sherlock rocked onto his side, laying his head on John’s chest. He was quiet for several minutes.

“The thing is, John,” he said. “By his lights, it was the right thing to do. In his mind, he was taking care of me. In his mind, he’s always had to take care of me.”

“You don’t destroy someone in order to save him.”

“It will be all right,” Sherlock said. “My amazing return from the land of the dead will create a sensation so enormous and overwhelming that the minions of the British Government will not dare touch me for fear of inciting a revolution. Mrs. Hudson hasn't rented 221B out yet, has she?”

"I don't think so," John said. 

"Wonderful," Sherlock murmured, settling his head on John's chest. 

"Are you really worth a hundred thousand pounds?" John said.

Sherlock's eyes sprang open. 

"Harry shouldn't have told you that," he said.

"She was executing your will, Sherlock. You were dead. Remember?"

Sherlock closed his eyes.

"How did you even accumulate it?"

"Not all of my clients pay me entirely in useless man-jewelry. Some of them have compensated me quite generously. The problem is one cannot predict from case to case what kind of bonus may be involved. So you don't spend it just because you have it. That's how you wind up like Clara Adair."

"We might at least have bought a new sofa, or something."

"John, someone has to save for your future and it's not going to be you. Admit it. You're hopeless. They shouldn't even let you have a cash card."

"Well all right, but...of all the lawyers in the world you could go to for your will...why Harry?"

"Does it really matter, John?" Sherlock said, annoyed.

"Yes. Especially since you seem not to want to answer the question."

"She was right," Sherlock said, finally. "I wanted to know if she was really sober. You were getting your hopes up, and...You're not an addict, John. You self-medicate but that's different. You don't know what it takes for an addict to get clean. I was bored and I thought up my scheme and I dressed up and got on the train out to Norwood, and I was going over the literature on her website...and the thought occurred that it might be useful to have a will. If I died without one you would get nothing. So I drafted it, there on the train. And then Harry turned out to be sober after all."

Maybe the story as Sherlock knew it; but not, John thought, the whole story. Sherlock wouldn't want to think about the timing. About the fact that this sudden interest in finding out whether John had any family he could really count on, this idle perusal of Harry's brochures about the importance of making a will, came right after he and John had gone through their near-death experience together at the pool. John closed his eyes and he could still hear Sherlock's voice echoing on the tiles. _Are you all right?_ Still feel Sherlock fighting through panic to get to him and rip that hideous coat from his back. That was the moment, John thought. That's when everything started to change. He doesn't know that. It would bother him to know that. Fine, John thought, I will know it for both of us.

"Sherlock," John said, after a pause. "Why _did_ you come back...when you did?"

There was a long, but fairly peaceful, silence.

"I read your last post."

"But I didn't publish it."

"You saved it as a draft. I keep telling you, I know all your passwords. I will always know all your passwords, John." 

"Miserable fucker," John muttered. 

After a moment, Sherlock said, "You were so sad."

John lay quiet, listening to Sherlock breathe.

"I suppose I thought you might miss me for a few days, and after that...I thought you'd be glad enough to have a rest from me."

John held Sherlock tighter. "But I wrote that the day Harry showed up. That was weeks ago."

"Well, I read it, and...I thought, I've got to tell him I'm not dead. And then I thought, when he finds out I'm not dead he'll kill me himself. Then I will be dead and he'll have killed me and he'll go to jail and not be able to inherit."

"Sherlock, you mad bastard...do you really think I would ever..."

"There were people shooting at me every day, John, it tends to give one's thoughts a rather paranoid cast. But then you found the easter egg, and I got the alert, and to make it work I had to...talk to you through that handheld thing. I heard your voice. You _were_ angry. But you called me. So...I came."

There was another silence.

"You don't mind 221B that much, do you, John?" Sherlock said, a little anxiously.

"No," John said. "No. I miss the old place. I'll be glad to be back there. With you in it."

Anyway, John thought, just before he fell asleep. If we move to a different place together, people will talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would just like any Top Chef fans out there to know how hard it was to resist the temptation to have Mycroft tell Sherlock to please pack his knives and go.
> 
> I wasn't really planning on weaponizing Harry's knives when I introduced them...but somehow at the end of part 5, when Sherlock's reminded that they don't have the gun, that became the answer to the question, "What would Sherlock do?"


	7. EPILOGUE: DANCING IN THE DARK

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Behold, the epilogue. In which all the remaining loose ends are tied up. And there is some celebrating. Some public, some private.

For once, John got through the self-checkout line without incident. Hoisting a bag containing mostly beer, he stepped out onto the sidewalk and the familiar path back to 221B. He’d got halfway there before he remembered that he needed to buy something for Harry to drink. He stepped into a convenience store, bought a bottle of Tizer, amused himself by imagining her reaction, and was so busy contemplating the range of her possible responses that he almost didn’t notice the sleek black car parked opposite the store entrance.

He stood there on the stoop, facing it stupidly, the beer in the crook of one arm and the bottle of Tizer in the other. Then he turned and began walking.

The car kept pace with him, of course. It was an effort not to speed up. He was vexed at how much its presence bothered him. With proper mental discipline he ought to be able to ignore anything.

He stopped at the corner to wait for the light. The car pulled up next to him. The rear window rolled down.

John did not turn to look at the face of whatever stunning Bond girl was sitting in the back seat this time.

“Please come with us, Dr. Watson.”

Without approaching the car, John finally turned and addressed himself to its very attractive occupant.

“Tell Mycroft,” he said, “that I am not at home when he’s calling. Ever.”

“Do come,” purred the woman. “It’s so unpleasant otherwise.”

“No,” said John. “The unpleasant, do it now. Abduct me from the streetcorner in broad daylight. Shoot me. Wipe out my entire bank balance. Post surveillance footage of me using the toilet on YouTube. Whatever you’re threatening to do to me if I don’t get into that car, just do it. Fucking do it and be done.”

The light changed. John crossed the street. The car made a left turn and passed out of sight.

* * *

John looked at the table. There was nowhere to put down the bags. Every inch of it was covered with glass tubing, beakers, burners, pipettes, and other paraphernalia.

“Sherlock!” he shouted.

The dark curly head appeared from under the table. “What is it?”

John considered asking why Sherlock was under the table, and then decided against it. “I thought you were going to tidy up.”

“I am tidying,” Sherlock said. “I’m organizing the equipment. I have all the chemistry things over here on this table, and all the agars and petri dishes and biological things on the living room table. I thought you’d rather have the microbes farther away from the fridge this time.”

John went to the fridge, opened it warily, and with a sigh of relief tucked the bottles away. No specimens. Yet.

“One of Mycroft’s minions made a pass at me today.”

Sherlock looked up from the disassembled test tube rack. “Really.”

“I wondered how long it would take.”

“Hope springs eternal, I suppose.” Sherlock crawled from under the table, threw himself onto the couch, and lay back staring at the ceiling. “Were you in the habit of colluding regularly behind my back? How often did you have those little chats?”

“I didn’t mind, usually,” John said, returning to the couch. Sherlock lifted his feet so John could sit down, then replaced them on John’s lap. “I always found it touching. I think he just…liked talking about you with someone else who cared.”

Sherlock snorted. “He doesn’t care. He said so.”

“You’re not dead,” John said, resting a hand on Sherlock’s knee. “And nobody’s shooting at you. He must be pulling strings or something.”

“Why are you defending him? You just told his minion to sod off.”

“I know, Sherlock, but…oh. Mrs. Hudson. I'll do that.”

She was struggling through the doorway with an enormous platter heaped nearly a foot high with something that had been covered in foil. John got up and took it out of her hands. Mrs. Hudson opened the fridge door for him.

“It’s just a few things to nibble on in case people get peckish,” she said. “There ought to be food, and it’s not right to make Harry cook tonight.”

“She’ll do it anyway,” John said. “She likes doing it.”

“You boys take advantage of that poor girl,” Mrs. Hudson said. “She’s not your housekeeper either.”

Muttering to herself, Mrs. Hudson descended the stairs.

“Are we going to tell her?” John said.

“Tell her what?” Sherlock answered.

“Never mind.”

He knew it shouldn’t bother him. Most of the time, nothing did—which, in its way, was a miracle all its own. None of the things about Sherlock that made him the worst flatmate in Christendom had changed. But John found that he had rather grown fond of these peculiarities, and that at moments when, before the Return, he would have felt that urge to punch Sherlock in the face, he now felt an urge for contact of a different kind. Sherlock had put off new cases until the loose ends in the Adair case had been cleared up, and that looked like taking a while. Because of the media, they rarely went out together, and John did what he could to prevent Sherlock from going out alone. Moriarty, Ltd. might no longer be a going concern, but nobody knew how many of its individual members might still be at large. He and Sherlock had spent most of the weeks since what the tabloids were calling “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” holed up in 221B. It had been a honeymoon, of sorts.

It was just that they never talked about any of it. Sherlock had used the word “love” once, that night that he appeared through the window—and never again. John had never used it at all. Nevertheless, they continued to _make_ love in the same erratic, intense, astonishing, and exhausting way they had done it on the night of his return. And now they were having people in for the first time since they’d moved back; and John wanted to know how it was all supposed to work.

Resigned to doing the tidying himself, John plugged his iPod into the docking station and put it on shuffle. Then he pulled out half a dozen plastic bags and started filling them with the rubbish that littered the living area. Sherlock went on sorting through his equipment, and the puddle of chaos around him spread slowly outward.

Barely listening to the music, John filled three bags with empty take-away cartons, torn cardboard boxes, bottles, bits of dessicated food…they’d only been living there for two weeks and already the place was disappearing into the maelstrom of crap. Pleased with his industry, John had deposited the third bag by the door and turned back to the living area when he heard something that sounded like a sob from the vicinity of the kitchen table.

It was Sherlock. He was curled up like a foetus on the linoleum floor, surrounded by cylinders and tubes and other fantastically shaped bits of glass and plastic. His eyes were closed, and he was shuddering.

John crouched carefully down next to him. The tubes clinked as they rolled out of his way. Above the sound of Sherlock’s moaning, the piano ground its way up a minor scale as the solo violin wailed above it, throbbing and blue. John recognized the piece, though he couldn’t name it. Something by Ravel. Sherlock had spent nearly a week listening to it nonstop while trying to solve the problem of the persecution of John Vincent Pound. After the Fall, John had found a couple gigabytes’ worth of pirated classical music that Sherlock had hidden on his laptop. In a fit of sentimentality, he’d made a playlist out of it.

“Sherlock? Sherlock, will you let me—“

John touched his shoulder. Sherlock grabbed John’s hand with one of his own, pressing it into his own shoulder with unnecessary and uncomfortable force.

“If this isn’t a seizure—“

“It’s not!” Sherlock shouted, eyes still closed.

“Then tell me,” John said, as gently as he could. “Tell me what it is.”

The violin wound sinuously on, slinking through the arpeggios that fell from the piano like rain.

“It’s the music,” Sherlock finally choked out.

John waited. The pressure on his hand increased.

“I feel it everywhere,” Sherlock whispered. “In my whole body.”

John finally freed his hand and put an arm around Sherlock’s shoulders. Sherlock let John raise him up from the floor. Once on his knees, Sherlock opened his eyes. The sight of John’s face seemed to double Sherlock’s distress. Sherlock seized John by the shoulders as if the whole universe were melting around them.

“Eyes and hands, eyes and ears and hands and that’s all,” Sherlock went on. “I trained myself. I couldn’t survive otherwise. Too much information. Can’t have a four-alarm response to every insignificant stimulus that breathes across the skin. Get it all bundled, lay down a few major cables, cut off the other avenues. Eyes, ears, hands, and that’s all. And now…and since…”

Sherlock pulled John’s body against his with a shock that electrified the kiss that followed. Sherlock’s chest was still shuddering, though his mouth was firm now, eager, insistent and unafraid. When their heads finally separated, and John stared into Sherlock’s eyes, it seemed to him as if the pupils had opened wider than ever, as if both of them might be falling down those tunnels into all-consuming darkness.

“You did this to me,” Sherlock said, piteously. “I have _flesh_ now. It’s horrible. I’m all de-corked and untrammeled and all the pathways are lit up and it’s too much. It’s too much.”

Despite the terror he felt while forming the words, John said, “If you don’t…if you want to stop…”

“No!” Sherlock cried, as his fingers dug even harder into John’s shoulders. “I want it. I want it all and it is too much!”

Sherlock released John’s shoulders, collapsing back onto his heels.

“I’m not fit for anything. I can’t work in this condition.”

John slid into a more comfortable sitting position. This was all still terrifying, but he felt he was now on more familiar ground.

“What people do, Sherlock, is they compartmentalize. Put work in one box, and put…sex, and so forth…in another.”

“So which box do you go in?” Sherlock demanded.

John opened his mouth, but nothing came to mind.

“Exactly,” Sherlock said. “No good. So then what? You spend two weeks reducing me to a weepy heap of sensation-sodden meat and now you want to make me deal with _people_.”

“I asked you if it would be all right—“

There was a knock on the door. Sherlock subsided to the floor with a groan, covering his head with his arms.

“Should I…turn off the…”

“No!” Sherlock shouted from inside the ball he’d curled into. “Leave it! I like it!”

With great misgivings, John went to the door.

Well, at least it was Harry. Not too much surprised her these days. She was carrying a casserole dish.

“You weren’t supposed to cook tonight,” John said.

“I’m not cooking tonight. I cooked yesterday.”

She headed toward the fridge.

“Harry, let me take that…” John began, but it was too late. She was in the kitchen.

“Hello, Sherlock.” Harry barely glanced down, stepped right over him, opened the fridge, and put the casserole dish in. “Oh God. _Tizer_! My secret shame!”

“Don’t touch it, Harry, it’s for tonight.”

Harry closed the fridge door, stepped back over Sherlock, and sat down on the couch in the living area.

"How's the move coming?" John said.

"Well, I think I found a space. The price is right, anyway. It's dingy but I can paint it."

Harry had decided to move to London. She was part of the story now, and she could capitalize better on the name recognition. And, though neither of them was willing to acknowledge this explicitly, they both wanted to be closer to each other. This sibling thing, John hadn't realized how much he had missed it.

“So..." she said, motioning toward Sherlock's recumbent form. "Is tonight perhaps not a good night for this wake thing?”

“He’ll be all right,” John said, hoping it would somehow come true.

“I suppose he will,” she said, unzipping her case and pulling out her laptop. “Hey Sherlock,” she called. “I brought you a present.”

Sherlock did not respond. Probably he was envisioning another tie pin.

“So, Clara’s estate remains in legal purgatory,” Harry said, settling her feet on the trunk that served as coffee table. “Her father has roused himself from his dreams of capitalist domination to challenge the will on the grounds that Clara was mentally ill and/or under duress when it was made. It’s no skin off my nose; I’d just as soon let her dad have _that_ mess.”

“I wouldn’t think she had much left to leave,” John said.

“She does and she doesn’t. Clara Adair died stony broke and in debt. Under her real name, all Clara still owned were those properties. The trust itself is part of her estate, but Sherlock was right: Clara pretty much emptied the thing before she died. But about £25,000 of what she’d raided from the trust was still stashed in the account she opened under the name Joan McFarlane, which of course is the identity Clara had planned to assume after her ‘death.’ Exactly who gets _that_ money is a question that will not be decided in a hurry. Meanwhile they’re still trying to find the woman Clara named as executor; and if they can’t find her, well, the alternate listed is our friend Sebastian Moran, so that’s rather a spanner in the works. But,” she said, as she saw John’s eyes begin to wander anxiously back in Sherlock’s direction, “I have made some progress on the Cornelius Management Group.”

John heard a clatter from the direction of the kitchen. Sherlock sitting up.

In case of Harry’s being unable to inherit—as, had she been convicted of Clara’s murder, she certainly would have been—Clara’s will stipulated that her estate should be placed in a trust to be administered by the Cornelius Management Group. Sherlock was certain that the Cornelius Management Group was either an alias for or a subsidiary of Moriarty, Ltd.

“Though I am quite proud of it,” Harry said, “you probably don’t want to hear the story of how I wrested this information from the bowels of the financial industry. But here, at last, is the list of the legal names of the individuals that make up the Cornelius Management Group.”

A pattering of stocking feet, a springing hop, and Sherlock flew over the back of the couch, landing between John and Harry.

“Show me! Show me!”

He snatched the computer off Harry’s lap and leaned toward the screen. John watched the bluish light flicker over Sherlock’s face. He was a laser beam now: focused, intense, utterly committed to the pattern of light and dark that was scrolling up the screen.

“John, get your laptop. Pull up your blog, we’re going to cross-check every one of these names. Have you shown this to Lestrade?”

“He has a copy. I’m not sure he’s been through it. He’s still coping with the envelope.”

John chuckled as he padded off to the bedroom in search of his laptop. He had started keeping it on the highest shelf in the closet, in a case with a lock on it. Harry had finally and triumphantly delivered Lestrade’s envelope into his hands at his office at the Yard—only regretting, as she said later, that she did not have the time or money to hire a brass band to play it in. Lestrade opened the envelope, removed a thumb drive from it, plugged it into his computer, and then let his jaw hang open for a full five minutes as he opened folder after folder containing leads for more than a dozen of Lestrade’s unsolved cases from the year before Reichenbach. Harry had described with relish the flurry of activity that followed. The phone calls, the emails, the mountains of forms requested from various offices, the shouts of _Donovan! Find Anderson and tell him to make a big pot of coffee, because nobody in forensics will be sleeping this week!_

Returning with his laptop, John found Harry wandering around the living area collecting more trash. Sherlock was, as far as John could tell, attempting to actually crawl into the screen of Harry’s laptop and become one with it.

“John Clay,” he muttered. “I knew it, I knew he couldn’t have pulled off that bank job on his own…oh dear, isn’t this one currently the Bishop of Bath and Wells? That’s a serious blow to the church’s one foundation…that father and son team of upper class twits from Reigate, that’s no surprise…”

Sherlock went silent. John saw Harry move around the couch to look over his shoulder. John himself could see the name that had stopped Sherlock in his tracks just as clearly as if it was printed in the air before him.

“Irene Adler,” John said, softly, to himself.

“Irene Adler,” Harry read. “Well, you knew that already.”

Sherlock said nothing.

“What about our friend Sebastian?” John asked, planting himself back on the couch, close enough to Sherlock that they might accidentally touch.

“Oh, he’s chairman of the board,” Harry said.

John looked at Sherlock. Whatever Irene’s name had called up in him, he’d moved past it. His lips were moving silently as he ran down the rest of the names, memorizing the ones he didn’t already know. Sherlock at work. Compartmentalizing. Without being aware of it. With that violin and piano Ravel thing still quivering all around them.

John knew all of a sudden that the instant he stopped working, Sherlock would forget how he felt at this moment. That Sherlock would, when he was in that other state he’d entered so abruptly just twenty minutes earlier, not remember or know how to get back to this one. Sherlock’s mind appeared to John as a clouded and snow-capped mountain range. A series of dazzling and towering peaks, each blazing white against a jewel-blue sky, but each separated from the others by abysses that he could not imagine how to navigate. No level ground; no rolling hills. Just this violent shuttling from one summit to another, passing with each transition through an annihilating darkness.

It was a new thing for John, this Sherlock who did not in fact know everything—even, especially, about himself. The idea that there were some things that John could—that he, in all conscience, should—teach Sherlock.

Looking at the dashboard of his blog, John saw the title The Last Post in the draft section. _It happens in the dreams exactly as it did in life except for one thing…_

Quietly, but with great satisfaction, he pressed the button reading “DELETE.”

* * *

“Greg,” John said, opening the door. “You’re early.”

“Yeah, it’s a bit of a work thing actually,” Lestrade said. “Mind if I come in?”

John waved him through the doorway. “Of course not. We invited you, you bollocks.”

Penitent Lestrade had been entertaining for the first few days—Sherlock in particular played Lestrade’s guilt as if it was a church organ, and hugely enjoyed the music it made—but as John gradually got over it he was impatient for Lestrade to get over it too. Passing the couch with a wave in Sherlock’s direction, Lestrade went to the fridge and put in the beer he’d brought.

“Tizer?” he said, shooting a glance at Harry, who was washing out the glasses. She seemed to think they needed to be cleaned, even though they’d been sitting packed away in newspaper for over a month. “Who’s drinking this shite?”

“I am,” Harry said.

“Fair enough,” Lestrade responded, closing the fridge door. “Leave that for a minute, will you, Harry, I want to show you something.”

Lestrade shoved his way onto the couch. Harry sat on the rug by the end of the table. Sherlock barely even looked up. Lestrade glanced at Sherlock, decided against speaking to him, and pulled out his mobile.

“Do you recognize this woman?”

Lestrade handed the phone to Harry. The screen showed what looked like the Facebook picture of a woman in her twenties. She had long, dark, gently waving hair, an unusually white and dazzling smile, and a pair of smallish but perfectly shaped breasts half-displayed by the scoop neck of her black leotard.

Harry was quiet for a moment—but not, as everyone from John to Lestrade to the now-interested Sherlock realized, because she didn’t know the answer.

“Yes,” Harry said. “She taught yoga at a place called Zenana out in Norwood. Clara gave me a gift certificate for them one year for Christmas. It turned out not to be my thing. She was nice enough. She had some other job doing something with software. I think her name was Cissie.”

Lestrade nodded. “Full name, Frances Carfax.”

Harry took a sharp, surprised breath.

“The woman named as executor in Clara’s will,” Sherlock said.

“Yes,” said Lestrade. “But more to the point—“

“She’s Crunchy Frog Pond,” Sherlock exclaimed.

Lestrade gave a little twitch of annoyance. “Yes. She’s the body that was burned in the frog pond. Took a while to establish identity beyond a shadow of a doubt, but with good old-fashioned plodding police work we got there. Frances Carfax took a holiday from the yoga studio two days before Clara disappeared and hasn’t been seen since. The body of course is a ruin but we have found evidence placing Carfax in the Norwood house, though we can’t be sure how long ago.”

“I can,” Harry said.

Lestrade stared at her. “How?”

“She has to have been there at least once before that night, and probably several times. When I went into the bathroom I saw Clara’s hairbrush had long dark hairs tangled up in it. Long dark hairs in the bath drain, too. I may as well admit I also went through the medicine cabinet. There was makeup in there that can’t have been Clara’s. I knew Clara must have found someone else, someone who occasionally stayed the night. It didn’t matter to me at the time. We were broken up, why shouldn’t she. I thought…oh, who cares what I was thinking.”

“You never told me any of that,” Lestrade said. “It might have helped, you know. I mean it might have helped you. Give us another possible suspect.”

“You didn’t ask the right questions,” Harry replied. “And you didn’t ask nicely.”

The tension crackling between Harry and Lestrade made John suddenly and violently anxious.

“I’m sorry, Harry,” Lestrade said. “I didn’t want people to say I’d gone easy on you.”

“I don’t think you need worry about that,” Harry answered.

“Anyway,” John finally broke in.

“So then,” Sherlock said, at the same time.

John let Sherlock go on.

“Crunchy Frog Pond,” said Sherlock happily, “or as we must now call her Frances Carfax, was Clara’s lover. Frances Carfax is named in the will and she has computer skills, so Clara likely brought her into the conspiracy. Probably Frances helped set up the Joan McFarlane identity. Clara would have told her that after she ‘died,’ Frances would execute the will, make sure the Cornelius Management Group got the properties—that must have been Clara’s payment to Moran—and then quietly drop out of sight. Then Frances and Clara, reborn as Joan McFarlane, would take the trust money, go somewhere far away, and start a new life together. We’ll never know for sure what Frances thought would happen that night in Norwood, but let’s pretend. I’m Clara, I love intrigue, I love romance, I love to have a beautiful woman saying she’ll do anything for me. I love games, and I know life is short and this one may be my last. I’ll make it a good one.”

Sherlock sat erect on the couch now, his eyes gone to some place inside his head, where he was seeing all this as clearly as if it were happening right there in the room.

“I tell Frances, it’s you I love but I can’t stay away from Harry, it’s a fatal attraction, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll get Harry out to the house, we’ll kill her together, we’ll burn her body and pretend she’s me and frame Harry for my murder. The police will think she’s a fugitive and go on looking for her forever. Don’t worry, Cissie, I’ll do the shooting part. You help me with disposal and then we can leave it all behind and start fresh, just you and me and a huge pile of cash. Frances is hooked, yes, Clara’s got her on a string and Frances is playing her games just like all of Clara’s lovers always have. Only Frances isn’t as smart as Harry. She doesn’t know Clara as well as she thinks she does. She doesn’t know Clara’s ruthlessness. She doesn’t know that Clara doesn’t intend to share that money with anyone. She doesn’t want a witness, and she knows that with Harry tried and convicted and the case closed, she stays a lot more dead a lot longer. Literally, all Frances is to her is a warm body. Soon to be a crunchy toasty one.”

“Sherlock,” John said, warningly.

Undeterred, Sherlock went on. “So Frances falls for it when Clara says: before we do this terrible thing together we must give ourselves to each other completely. Come out to the pond with me, I want to do this under the stars. She takes Frances to the frog pond, apologizing for the absence of the proper romantic setting, the purling stream and the water lilies. Sorry, Cissie, closed for repairs. Clara says, close your eyes and pretend you hear them, the bubbling brook and the chanting frogs. Now give me your hand, with this ring I plight thee my troth, and the motion-sensing outdoor lights click on, and Clara steps back as Frances watches the yellow diamond sparkle, and Sebastian takes aim from the roof of the garage and BANG!”

Harry covered her ears with a scream. Lestrade jumped in his seat and let fly a curse at exactly the same moment that John shouted, “For fuck’s sake, Sherlock!”

Sherlock turned to Lestrade, with a self-satisfied and rather wicked smile. John slid off the couch, knelt next to Harry, and put an arm around her shoulders. Harry leaned her head on John’s shoulder. She was crying. Silently. Angrily.

“How did you know about the motion sensors?” Lestrade said.

“Of course there are motion sensors. It’s a McMansion.”

“And the garage roof?”

“Best vantage point for a sniper, at least based on John’s description of the property.”

Lestrade appeared to be trying to find the entrance to his mind cottage.

With a sigh, Lestrade pulled out his mobile and began typing. “Check…garage roof…for evidence…”

“I don’t know how you got along without me,” Sherlock said.

Lestrade ignored him until he had sent the message. “We’ll have a look and see if we find anything,” he said. “Be nice if we could put Moran on the spot for that killing too. Not that we need anything else to charge him with, but it’s my new mission in life to slap as many life sentences as I can on that bastard. I would bring back the rope just for him if I could do it. You never played on a team, did you, Sherlock?”

“I was on a quiz team once,” Sherlock said. “Till they banned me.”

“So you don’t know what it’s like when someone who’s _on_ the team fucks it over,” Lestrade went on. “Well I do and it’s bloody awful and I want every piece of dirt Moran has ever done to be aired in court and then rebroadcast nightly on BBC One. Donovan seems to share this ambition. She doesn’t like being played for a fool. Of course that’s why she’ll always hate you, Sherlock. But we’ll get him so far into jail he’ll never come out.”

“I know he won’t,” Sherlock muttered.

Sherlock was convinced that Moran would be found dead in his cell before he ever stood trial. John decided not to share this theory with Lestrade. It would only demoralize him.

“You all right, Harry?” John said.

Harry got shakily to her feet, pushing herself up on John’s shoulder.

“I’ll give it to you, Sherlock,” Harry said, as she returned to the kitchen. “You know Clara pretty well, considering you never met her.”

“I have met her,” Sherlock said.

“When?” Harry demanded.

“In the morgue.”

The appalled look on Harry’s face fortunately did not translate itself into language.

“Right,” said John, jumping to his feet. “I’m hungry. Greg? Stay for supper?”

Lestrade grunted assent as he began staring at the names on Harry’s laptop.

“Everyone all right with Chinese?”

As John punched in the number of the takeaway place, he heard Harry saying, “How’s Kitty?”

Lestrade groaned. “Insufferable.”

“But she’s testifying.”

“Yes, she’s testifying, and we’ll be very lucky if the melodrama doesn’t kill the jury outright. At the very least I think their ears will bleed. Every revelation is its own telenovela. Sherlock was right; Clara promised her the dirt on BIBI’s ‘orgies,’ as Kitty unfailingly calls them. Course she didn’t tell Kitty who she was. Used the name…I think it was…yes. Mary Morstan.”

John dropped the mobile. All their eyes fastened themselves onto him.

“What?” Lestrade said. “Does it mean something?”

John snatched up the phone and walked briskly into the bedroom. As he shut the door, he could just hear Harry’s answer.

“It’s a joke, Lestrade,” she said. “A hideous, cruel, unfunny joke. That’s all my heart and soul ever were to Clara Adair.”

* * *

By the time eight o’clock rolled around John barely recognized the apartment. All the detritus had been cleared away; Harry and Greg had done that together. Mrs. Hudson had come up and the three of them had helped set up the bar in the kitchen and plant the trays of food around in strategic locations. The trunk had been pushed against the wall and cushions put on it to turn it into more seating. John looked around and was surprised to feel his heart expand. Their home. Their living room. Their party.

A small party, of course. Just the two of them, and Harry, and Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade, and…

A knock on the door.

John went to open it. And there was Molly. She had stopped to change after work; but this time she hadn’t overdone it. Skinny jeans, stacked-heel boots, and a big caramel-colored cable sweater that enfolded her whole torso and yet did not entirely swallow it. She had her hands in her pockets, and a lopsided little smile on her face.

“Molly. So good to see you. Come in.”

Molly let John give her a little peck on the cheek, and advanced, diffidently, into the room. Sherlock and Harry were sitting on the trunk, which was in danger of being baptized by Tizer as Harry tried to drive home her end of whatever interesting argument they were having. Lestrade had drifted over to the bar, and Mrs. Hudson was relaxing on the couch with a glass of red wine and John’s Victoria’s Secret catalogue.

“No,” Harry was saying, as John and Molly approached. “That’s just you being a pain in the arse on principle. You know there’s a difference.”

“If there wasn’t a big ‘free range’ label on that chicken, you would not be able to taste the difference. What you believe is external sensory perception is purely psychological. The chemical composition of the meat is simply not so different—“

“Look, Sherlock, I’m going out to the farmers’ market tomorrow and I’m going to get a free-range, organically fed chicken that has been raised in the country on a farm instead of in a crate inside a factory, and you boys can come over and eat it and you tell me whether it doesn’t taste better than those pathetic embalmed things John brings home from your corner grocery.”

“Done,” Sherlock said. John was fairly sure that Sherlock enjoyed the process of wangling a dinner out of Harry more than he enjoyed eating it. Sherlock looked up to see if John was enjoying it too, and saw Molly.

“Molly,” Sherlock said, standing up.

She clasped her hands in front of her, looking down at the floor, and then up at him, hopeful and resigned at the same time.

“Harry,” Sherlock said, touching Molly’s shoulder to introduce her, “this is Molly Hooper. She saved my life.”

Harry hoisted herself to her feet. John looked at Molly looking at Sherlock. The man who died, the woman who helped him do it. Harry shook Molly’s hand, and John felt the gratitude mix with the anger and even maybe just a little jealousy.

“I’m so glad to meet you,” Harry was saying. “And I’m so glad you’re back at St. Bartholomew’s.”

That had taken some doing. But it was the first task Sherlock set himself after the Return. Looking at Sherlock look at Molly, still feeling the sting, John tried to see it differently. To see in Sherlock’s shining eyes an image of something else; to hear, in Sherlock’s simple, strangely humble, declaration of his debt to her, a new understanding of trust, an accurate appreciation of the gift of loyalty.

“Here,” Molly said, shrugging her handbag awkwardly off her shoulder. “I brought you…I thought you ought to have it.”

Molly thrust a fairly thick document in Harry’s direction.

“It’s a copy of the autopsy report. On Clara Adair. The real Clara Adair. Not the one who’s really Frances Carfax.”

“Molly…” John said, closing his eyes in chagrin. “You shouldn’t bring an autopsy report to a party…”

“No,” Harry said, taking the document. “No, you did right to bring it. This is Clara’s wake, after all. Thank you, Molly. It’s kind of you.”

Molly nodded, averting her eyes. Harry sat back down on the trunk to look at it. Sherlock said, “Molly, can I get you a drink?”

Molly could not have been more startled if one of the corpses had spoken to her.

“Is there any white wine?” she said, timidly.

“I’ll get you some.”

Sherlock drifted away. John said, without looking at her, “Thank you.”

“I told him you’d be furious,” Molly blurted.

“I know. But thank you. For, you know. Saving him.”

“I’d do anything for him,” Molly said quietly.

“I know you would,” John answered, awkwardly.

Sherlock returned with her glass. John wondered where the wine glasses had come from. He hadn’t thought either of them owned any. The Touch of Harry, perhaps.

Sherlock handed Molly the wineglass. He turned to John, putting his lips very close to John’s ear. “Maybe we should give Harry her thing now?” he whispered.

“Good idea.”

Sherlock headed off into the bedroom. John sank onto the trunk with Harry. Molly stood in the middle of the floor, not knowing where to look or who to be with, and began draining her glass.

“Huh,” Harry said, pausing over a page of the report.

“What?” John said. “Don’t tell me she really had breast cancer.”

“No,” Harry replied. “But the inventory…it says she was wearing a gold ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. Molly, is that true?”

“What?” Molly said, blinking. “Oh—the ring. Yes. There was a date inside and the initials HW.”

Harry shook her head.

“We exchanged rings for our five-year anniversary," Harry said. "Wedding bands. You know. We stopped wearing them after we split up. It's strange that she was wearing hers. I assumed she’d pawned it. I pawned mine.”

Harry stared moodily into space for a few moments.

“Maybe she was planning to sell it later,” John said.

Harry looked down at the autopsy report.

“I don’t know, John,” Harry said. “There were some things she said to me, that night…”

John watched Sherlock come out of the bedroom, carrying an enormous mostly cubical thing clumsily wrapped in black plastic and tied up with police tape. Evidently when John had asked Sherlock to take care of wrapping Harry’s present, he had failed to provide sufficiently detailed instructions.

“Nine years,” Harry said. “And we did love each other about as well as two damaged, dishonest, demon-ridden, self-absorbed people could.” She closed the autopsy report. “Before I got sober, I was no prize. And at the end of the day…it could have been me in that frog pond. It wasn’t. I guess that’s something.”

She looked up, and saw Sherlock thrusting that crazy bundled thing in her direction.

“Here,” he said. “I guess happy birthday isn’t the thing to say. I don’t know what is. We want you to have it. Open it.”

Harry balanced it carefully on her knee, as if it might detonate. With some difficulty, she ripped off the plastic.

It was a knife block, bristling with a brand new set of knives.

“Oh my goodness,” Harry said, turning it around to admire it. “It’s beautiful.” She drew out the carving knife and turned it in the light. “Oh but you shouldn’t have. The ones you threw at Mycroft were really nothing special, and these…”

“Glad you like it,” Sherlock said. Harry saw that prolonging the ceremony would be a mistake, and handed the block back to him.

“Would you put these in the kitchen?”

Sherlock seized the block and returned with it, glad to have the presentation over with. Harry pushed herself up and took up a place in the middle of the room, a red tumbler of Tizer in one hand. Molly sat next to John on the trunk. Sherlock watched from the kitchen.

“Thank you all for coming to Clara’s wake,” Harry said. “This is my only chance to say goodbye. Her parents don’t want me at the funeral and I don’t like churches anyway. I want to say…”

Harry looked around at them all. Her brother. Her brother’s lover. The woman who had dissected her lover’s dead body. The man who had arrested and interrogated her. And Mrs. Hudson, still happily monopolizing the couch.

“I want to say that as horrible as this has been for me in so many ways, each of you has helped me through it somehow,” she said. “You’ve all been so generous to a woman you barely know. I feel lucky that way. In most other ways…I feel like shit. But thank you.”

“You’re very welcome, dear,” Mrs. Hudson called.

“Sherlock, would you get me the roasting tin from the drawer under the oven?”

“You have a roasting tin?” Mrs. Hudson said, as Sherlock began clanging around. “Sherlock can find the oven? When did all this happen?”

Sherlock handed it to her. Harry put the pan on the floor and put the autopsy report in it.

“Sorry, Clara,” she said. “I know it’s stupid, but this is all I have left of you to say goodbye to.”

She lifted her tumbler full of Tizer, holding it over the roasting tin as if about to pour a libation on it.

“I may never forgive you. But I’ll never forget you. Wherever you are, I hope there are no more games to play. I hope you’re finally happy. Safe journey, honey. To wherever your home really is.”

Harry tilted the tumbler. Tizer poured from the side of the cup, spattering onto the autopsy report. A sticky red puddle congealed around it.

Harry dropped the empty cup into the roasting tin. Nobody seemed quite sure what to do. John had a horrible feeling that Sherlock was about to start giggling.

“And now,” Harry said, clapping her hands, “let’s dance.”

She went to the docking station, where her iPod was ready, and started up the breakup playlist. A steady, rattling bass line rolled in like thunder.

“I WALKED FORTY-SEVEN MILES OF BARBED WIRE…”

“Oh!” came a shout from Lestrade’s direction. “I _love_ this song!”

Lestrade fairly hopped over the bar, and before anyone quite knew what was happening they were feasting their eyes on the spectacle of Harry and Lestrade, bobbing up and down to the drumbeat, shaking their heads and shoulders to the melody, facing each other and howling out, “WHOOOOOOOOOOOOO DO YOU LOOOOOVE?”

John burst out laughing. Sherlock was next. It didn’t bother Harry or Lestrade. They kept dancing. After a while, Lestrade reached out to take her hand, but Harry waved him off.

“Sorry,” Harry said. “I only know how to lead. I need a follower. Mrs. Hudson?”

“My dancing days are far behind me, dearie,” Mrs. Hudson called back. “I’ve forgotten how.”

“Ah, you never forget, Mrs. Hudson. It’s like riding a bicycle. Come on. Dance with me.”

With some coaxing, Mrs. Hudson allowed Harry to lead her off the couch. The beat faded out and was replaced by the beginning of a new song heralded by synthetic chords that set Sherlock’s teeth on edge. Harry took Mrs. Hudson by the hands, and they began. Backwards and forwards, Harry adjusting so Mrs. Hudson could take smaller steps, letting her baby her bad hip. The annoying female voice finally sang out some recognizable words.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stron-gerrr…”

With an exclamation of contempt, Lestrade left the floor to Harry, Mrs. Hudson, and Kelly Clarkson. He stopped by Sherlock, helpfully distracting him from the music with a question about something or other. John watched Mrs. Hudson. She was happy—partly the wine, of course. But there was something about her face…she was glad to be in someone’s arms again, even if it was only Harry. Glad to be dancing with someone…someone friendly, and kind, someone who enjoyed cheering up John’s kooky landlady with a few minutes of gallantry. Someone so much like the Harry John had thought he’d lost forever. The Harry who taught him how to kick a football; the Harry who lied for him when he snuck out after dark with a girl; the Harry who so often put herself between John and their father’s anger.

“Now, John,” Harry said. “You took the same lessons I did. Show Mrs. Hudson what you can do.”

John stepped up and cut in. “May I?”

“Oh by all means,” Mrs. Hudson said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You never told me you could dance.”

“I’ve tried to block it out,” John replied, taking her hand.

The song changed again. Something slower, higher, and quieter, if just as synthetic. While John struggled to remember the box-step, Harry went over to Molly. “Would you like to dance?”

Molly shook her head. “I...no. I can’t.”

“Would you like to learn?”

As he led Mrs. Hudson into a turn, John could feel Sherlock’s eyes on him. Hard to know from this distance what he was thinking.

“I’m not good at…” Molly trailed off.

“Anything involving gross motor coordination?” Harry finished, helpfully.

“Yes,” Molly nodded.

“Give me ten minutes to see if I can teach you the basics,” Harry said. “Seriously, Molly. I’m a grieving widow. Humor me.”

Molly polished off her second glass of wine, and said, with a brave little smile, “Well…all right.”

The singer—it sounded like there might be two or three of her, in harmony—launched into the chorus. “Where there is desire, there is gonna be a flame…where there is a flame, someone’s gonna get burned…”

“Do you mind waltzing me back to the couch, dear,” Mrs. Hudson said to John. “It’s heavenly, truly, but the hip’s starting to play up.”

John piloted Mrs. Hudson back to her seat and her glass of wine. He found Sherlock, still hanging back by the fridge, watching Harry and Molly.

“Hold your hands out like this,” Harry said, demonstrating. Molly thrust her hands forward, as if she were afraid of them. Harry pushed Molly’s hands gently into the right shape, then took them in hers.

“All right, relax your arms. Relax. Relax. Like--all right, there we go. Right. This is the frame. This here, from your shoulders to our hands to my shoulders, this is how we communicate. That’s how I let you know where to go—through the pressure on your hands. When I push on your hands, like this,” she said, moving her hands forward, “you step back. Let’s just try that a few times.”

Molly nodded, looking down at her feet. Harry pressed forward gently, and Molly took a startled step back.

“Good. All right, you don’t want to line up exactly opposite me because we’ll tread on each other’s toes. Align your left knee sort of in between mine. Good. Once more. Don’t look at your feet. Look at me and think about your hands. All right?”

Molly gulped, and raised her eyes. “All right.”

“Good. You’re doing great, Molly. Here we go.”

One step backward, then forward, smoother this time. And again. Molly’s attention was wholly focused now. John thought he had never seen Molly make eye contact for that long with anyone. His own eyes were drawn down to the frame. The joined hands. Two people, not lovers, not even really friends. No particular attraction or desire. Two bodies in contact only at this one point. But translating each other all the same. Moving, as one, all the same.

Going to those dreary ballroom dance lessons as a child, John had never seen the point. His mother just thought it was something her children should learn to do. He watched Molly rock back on one foot, then rock forward, then laugh as she moved through to the second step. He saw the point, all at once, in those four joined hands. Touching, formalized. Communication, stylized. One body talking to another—safely, gently, in public, to music. A civilized conversation.

John looked at Sherlock. Sherlock was staring at Molly. He wasn’t bored. He was watching. No. Memorizing.

“Great, Molly,” Harry said, as the song ended. “All right, I think this next one is faster.”

A low beat like a ticking clock had begun.

“You know this one, Molly, everyone does. All right, wait for the beat and follow my lead.”

_”There’s a fire starting in my heart…reaching a fever pitch that’s bringing me out the dark…”_

John headed off to the bedroom. His thoughts were suddenly doing things to him that he didn’t want anyone to notice.

He walked into the darkened room and pushed the door behind him. It didn’t shut. John turned to see what had stopped it.

Sherlock caught the door with one hand and closed it softly behind him. The blinds were down and with the door closed the room was almost totally dark. John could hear the music coming in through the crack under the door. _See how I leave with every piece of you…Don’t underestimate the things that I will do..._

John groped in the dark for Sherlock’s hands. He found them. From the way Sherlock was holding them, he’d evidently decided that John was the leader.

John took a step forward. Sherlock’s hands resisted at first, then gave way. John walked him back and forth a few times, getting the the rhythm. With the offbeats it was slightly tricky. They’d do better with a closer hold.

One hand at the small of Sherlock’s back, the other holding his right hand, just about shoulder high. Sherlock’s head nestling itself, in one heartbreakingly soft motion, next to John’s. Breast against breast, heart against heart. Hips together. Slowly, forward and back, John changing direction just a little with every step. Slowly, together, circling.

Sherlock stretched his neck, stroking John’s cheek with his. John felt Sherlock’s breath warm on his lips before they touched.

_You’ll wish you…Never had met me…Tears are gonna fall…_

Each plunged toward the other. And it all broke loose. John grappled with Sherlock just as desperately as Sherlock was with him, stumbling about as their arms locked around each other. Not leading now, John thought, as he toppled backward and fell against the closet door. Doesn’t seem too much like anyone’s in command here.

Sherlock’s body hard against his, sliding downward. Sherlock’s hands burning a trail of fire along John’s chest, right down to the belt buckle that was rattling open. Adele had disappeared. Someone’s electric guitar was crashing down on top of someone else’s pounding bass line and some lonely man’s reverberating voice had left his body lying somewhere in the sands of time but John knew exactly where every atom of his own body was at this instant.

“They’ll hear, Sherlock,” John whispered, desperately.

Sherlock refused to acknowledge this, except by drawing him in deeper.

“Oh my God. Sherlock. Please. They’ll hear.”

Sherlock, with a noise of exasperation, rose up to face him, keeping a tight grip on him with one hand.

“So be quiet,” Sherlock hissed, into John’s right ear.

“I can’t,” John said, trembling all over. “They’ll hear.”

“Who cares?” Sherlock whispered.

“Would you want _Mycroft_ to hear you?”

Muttering darkly, Sherlock darted suddenly toward a pile of clothes on the floor. From it he extracted one end of his scarf. He darted back, pulled the scarf tight across the back of John’s head, wrapped it twice around John’s mouth, and knotted it at the back.

“Happy now?” Sherlock murmured.

Ignoring the little voice that always started shouting at him at moments like this, John closed his eyes, and nodded.

“All right then.” And, after a terrifying little pause, “You’re all right? John?”

Because this had never happened before.

John made a muted but affirming sort of noise.

Sherlock slid to his knees. John felt Sherlock’s hands on both hips, sliding around the back to grab hold. And his lips and his tongue and the cave of his mouth and _if I go crazy then will you still call me Superman_

It was all coming, all rippling up from the pit of his stomach through his burning throat. But instead of bursting into the air, the sounds he couldn’t not make vibrated in John’s body, humming in his throat and trembling in his shoulders and expanding in his lungs and even the scarf binding his mouth seemed to be alive and shuddering. Shuddering, gasping, and then a taut quivering string suddenly stretched from the base of his spine right to that spot behind his eyes, and it shook John from his teeth to the soles of his feet, burned him into a song that only Sherlock could hear.

When he realized that Sherlock was untying the scarf, John was collapsed in a heap at the bottom of the closet door. John’s throat was raw and his face was drenched. Tears. He had been crying. Hard.

Sherlock put his hands on John’s face. His fingers traveled softly, fluttering, over John’s closed eyes, along the lines of his brow.

“John,” he whispered. “John. What is…what was…John. Are you all right?”

Sherlock had been crying too.

“Yes,” John whispered.

They curled up together, Sherlock’s head tight against John’s chest, waiting for their breathing to slow down.

“John?” Sherlock said, softly, as some new song began, far away in the living room.

“Sherlock,” John said, touching Sherlock’s wet face with the fingertips of one hand.

But Sherlock was silent. John understood why. There was nothing left to be said now. Spoken or unspoken, they knew it all.

John could hear the words of the song now.

_Hey, I just met you…and this is crazy…but here’s my number…_

Sherlock slid off him into a ball on the floor, clapping his hands over his ears with a howl of pain.

“John! Make it stop! Go out there and stop it! Quick! Oh my God, if you love me at all, _make it go away!_ ”

John pulled his clothes together as fast as he could while Sherlock went on howling. He slipped through the bedroom door, closing it tight from the other side, and rushed to the living room, intending to snatch the iPod right of the dock.

He stopped.

Lestrade and Molly were dancing. Together. And they looked good. They both looked good. Mrs. Hudson was on the couch, leaning her head on one hand and beginning to nod off. Harry perched on the trunk, waving enthusiastically at Molly whenever she looked over for encouragement.

John slid onto the trunk next to Harry.

“I don’t mean to spoil it for them,” John whispered, “but you’ve got to change the song. It’s killing Sherlock.”

“I believe it,” Harry said. “But let them finish. There’s only, what, a dozen more choruses.”

* * *

The rest of the party John would only remember as snapshots. Sherlock’s head thrown back, laughing at something, John didn’t remember what and it didn’t matter. Harry and Molly and Mrs. Hudson trying to dance to “Single Ladies.” Lestrade voguing madly to “Moves Like Jagger” while the women egged him on. Sherlock, his cheeks flushed and his eyes bright, dancing in his own frantic way, amongst them but still alone, howling along to an encore performance from George Thorogood. Lestrade, pulling John earnestly into a corner, and saying, _you know, John, it’s all right. Everyone knows, down at the Yard. They don’t care. I mean they don’t care in a bad way. I mean mainly the only thing you have to worry about is that Donovan and Anderson have a bet on about who’ll be the first to find surveillance footage of you two snogging._

Mrs. Hudson heading tipsily off to bed, patting Harry’s hand, saying she hadn’t had such a good time since the day she was married. Lestrade walking Molly out the door, offering to split the cab ride home with her. Harry, with the knife block under one arm, hesitating on the threshold, and then putting it down to give John a hug. He could remember her arms around his shoulders. Hear himself saying, _I forgive you. For everything. Don’t disappear._

And then picking his way through the litter back to the iPod, and turning on that Ravel piece. And turning out the lights, and slipping into the bedroom where Sherlock was already waiting, naked and sprawled across the bed. And picking up the scarf, and laying it gently across Sherlock’s closing eyes. And saying _listen to the music. Just listen._ And knotting the ends of the woolen band behind Sherlock’s head.

 _We’ll do it just like the music_ , John could remember saying. _One sense at a time. We start out simple, and then it gets complex._

There were three movements in that sonata. It was just about long enough.

* * *

Sherlock was already up and at the chemistry set by the time John stumbled into his dressing-gown. He groped through the doorway, trying to figure out whether he was hung over, precisely, or whether it was just lack of sleep.

“What…?” John said, gesturing at the bubbling beaker.

“Project,” Sherlock said. “Not attached to a specific case.”

John let his hands rest briefly on Sherlock’s shoulders before investigating the fridge.

“Pity we didn’t put away any of the food from last night,” he murmured.

“I regret nothing,” Sherlock said.

John stood there for a while, smiling rather stupidly into the empty fridge, ceasing to notice where he was or what he was looking at. Apparently he had a mind palace now. It was just a different sort of establishment from Sherlock’s.

John’s mobile chirped. So did Sherlock’s.

“It’s not going to revolutionize forensic science,” Sherlock murmured, lifting the beaker. “But the Adair case is cleared up, I don’t have a new one, and my brain still needs work, John. I must feed it _something_ before it starts consuming itself.”

John gave up on the fridge and picked up his mobile. It was a media message from Harry.

“Sherlock,” John said, a moment later. “Pick up your phone.”

Sherlock looked at him, and went and found his phone.

From his face, and from the way he stopped moving, John knew that Sherlock was looking at exactly the same thing that was on his screen. It was a photo taken with Harry’s camera. It showed the neck, liver, and other innards of a chicken purchased that morning at the farmer’s market. And nestled amongst these bloody scraps was a bright blue sapphire, reflecting the light of the flash from what seemed like a thousand facets.

In the message field, Harry had typed, WENT TO MARKET. BOUGHT FRESHLY KILLED ORGANIC FREE RANGE COUNTRY BRED CHICKEN. WITH HEAD AND FEATHERS AND EVERYTHING. FOUND THIS IN THE GIZZARD. WTF, BOYS. W. T. F.

Sherlock looked up. And in those eyes, it was Christmas, Boxing Day, Easter, Halloween, Guy Fawkes and everything else.

Sherlock clasped the phone to his bosom, yelped, bounded into the air, flew across the kitchen, and kissed John as hard as he ever had.

“This is the best day of my life, John,” Sherlock said, when he finally paused for breath. “Either of them. I have everything. I have absolutely everything.”

John felt his heart trying to beat its way right out of his rib cage.

“The game’s afoot!” Sherlock shouted, scampering toward the bedroom. “Sound the alarm! Gather the necessary equipment! Clothes! Shoes! Cab fare! Laptop! No! Wait! I don’t have everything! There is one thing, one very important thing, that is missing!”

Sherlock motioned for the mobile. John handed it to him. Sherlock typed in, _Lestrade. We have a case. Where is John’s revolver, you miserable fucker? SH._

“A priceless jewel in a pile of chicken guts,” Sherlock said, bouncing over to the wardrobe. “There’s a crime at the other end of that story, John. Probably more than one. All of them no doubt fiendish. These little playthings are the devil's pet baits. For some gems there's been a murder for every facet carved into them. Humanity has risen to the occasion at last. Burn in hell, Jim Moriarty! _I don’t need you!”_

John opened the blinds. The sun was up, and it was blazing. A beautiful day to catch a jewel thief. A beautiful day to be on the earth. To be the man who had everything.

THE END.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After I finish writing something I always miss the characters. The temptation to bring them all back to just hang out and have fun with them is always strong. This one time, since there was a lot of stuff left to wrap up, I yielded to it.
> 
> For anyone who cares, here's a [playlist](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhYk12c2AbejvEBEZ8AqV0oqvVbnPtvrQ) containing all the music used in this chapter. And for non-YouTubers, here's a list:
> 
> Maurice Ravel, Violin Sonata (1923-27).
> 
> George Thorogood, "Who Do You Love?"
> 
> Kelly Clarkson, "Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You)"
> 
> Pink, "Try"
> 
> Adele, "Rolling in the Deep" (failure to include this song on your breakup mix makes you liable to a 100 pound fine and six months in prison)
> 
> Three Doors Down, "Kryptonite"
> 
> And...of course!... Carly Rae Jepsen, "Call Me Maybe."
> 
> Thought about throwing "Suit and Tie" in there, but could not stretch the boundaries of plausbility enough to imagine anyone in that room being a huge Justin Timberlake fan.


End file.
